MouseBank : A Database Application for Managing Transgenic Mouse Breeding Programs

We have developed a powerful tool for managing transgenic and knockout mouse programs using the Macintoshand Microsoft Windows-compatible relational database management system, 4th Dimension (4D). MouseBank is a user-friendly system designed for small laboratories and large workgroups to organize every aspect of the generation and breeding of transgenic animals. MouseBank is built on the client/ server model to handle any arbitrarily large number of researchers and projects. Using MouseBank, each researcher manages his or her own projects from a desktop computer, while the database resides on a fast server. MouseBank has been tested and is currently in use on Macintosh computers. MouseBank offers two views of the data. The Lab Director View is a traditional table-oriented view of the seven interrelated project data tables: Project, Mating Pair, Litter, DNA Construct, ES Clone, Production Experiment and Mouse. Records in an eighth table, User, are created by the database administrator and are used to enforce password-controlled access to the data (several other tables, largely invisible to the user, store database data as opposed to breeding project data). In the Researcher View, researchers can view only the records relating to the projects for which they are designated PI or to which they have been authorized access by the PI. Researchers are guided strictly through the logical hierarchy of the tables. Most users are restricted to the Researcher View; the Lab Director View, which cuts across all user boundaries, provides a cumulative overview of all breeding colonies in the laboratory to a few authorized users. Several program features minimize manual data entry. For example, mice are identified by any (up to) 16 characters, but if the ID contains a block of successive numerals, then the computer helps with the data entry. When a new litter is born, the researcher enters date of birth, location and strain of the litter and the ID of the first mouse. Thereafter, these data are stamped onto each successive pup record created during that session, incrementing the numeric part of the ID so that the researcher only enters the sex and genotype of subsequent pups in the litter. The user can override these computer-generated IDs at any time, however.