The APF has a full colony management service at the lowest external price in Australia. You can manage the breeding of your strains remotely through the “Musterer” database or task your dedicated project manager and colony coordinator to undertake your breeding and sampling management.

Our Maintenance service package includes:

• Mouse holding in Tecniplast Greenline IVC caging at a maximum of 5 adult mice/cage
• Breeding management for the majority of strain types
• Weaning
• ID or genetic sampling by ear punching
• Basic veterinary care including treatment of short-term conditions such as skin problems
• 24/7 Real-time access to strain data through the ‘Musterer’ web database
• Daily checks of mice and cage changing as required
• Genotyping of appropriate strains including the biopsy collection and genotype assay with results uploaded to the database for your real-time viewing

Our onsite veterinary manager can also deliver veterinary advice on ethics protocol applications, procedure developments/improvements, perform preliminary post-mortem and provide sample collection services on request.

APF Colony Health Management

Our facilities

The Australian Phenomics Facility colonies are all housed in Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) conditions within the Hugh Ennor Building. There are numerous hierarchies but all animals are housed in Individually Ventilated Cages.

Access and barriers

All animals imported to our facilities must be approved by the Head of Animal Services before importation and meet strict health requirements. With no direct importation to our top hierarchy all strains imported will be rederived into this area. Hierarchies are managed by separation of equipment and staff work from the cleanest hierarchy down. All colonies are maintained in IVC caging and handling performed in change stations or appropriate hoods with the exception of some research practices in certain areas.

• Level 3 Hugh Ennor Building houses our breeding and production colony and has restricted access to staff only.
• Level 2 Hugh Ennor Building comprises of our experimental colony and access is permitted to staff and researchers.
• Satellite facilities are maintained on a lower hierarchy and can be accessed by relevant researchers and staff only.

Facility health screening

The APF assesses the status of the facility by submitting regular samples for microbiological screening throughout the year. This obtains meaningful results of our animal population and allows accurate reporting of our facilities health status and enables the early detection of disease. The APF is made up of a number of SPF rodent holding ‘zones’ (considered distinct microbiological units) spread across 2 separate geographical locations. The majority of shipments originate from the APF maintained Hugh Ennor Building within Zones 2-9. Testing for the main experimental and breeding facilities is based on FELASA recommendations.

• A combination of random colony screening, survival colony screening and soiled bedding sentinels (Zones 9 & 18 only) are used for quarterly screening
• Samples from our Level 2 Mouse colony are collected at random to test for Viruses, Bacteria, Fungi and Parasites.
• Our level 3 colony in addition to the random sample screens also has a supplementary faecal PCR screening program for high risk pathogens including Parvovirus, Minute Virus of Mice, Rotavirus, Norovirus and Mouse Hepatitis Virus.

APF health reports:

• Sep 2019 - Aug 2021 (pdf 270.42KB)
• 1 Jan 2019 - 4 Dec 2019 (pdf 242.28 KB)
• 1 Jan 2016 - 31 Dec 2018 (.pdf 255.55 KB)