Mouse house is closing in Oak Ridge

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — The mouse house is closing at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

After more than six decades of developing a unique population of mice to study human diseases, the Department of Energy facility is being shuttered for budget reasons.

The $14 million Russell Laboratory of Comparative and Functional Genomics, which opened in 2003, will be converted for other research, including biofuels, and its current colony of 8,000 specially bred mice will move to the University of North Carolina.

Oak Ridge’s experiments with mice since the 1940s helped establish standards for human exposure to radiation, identified genes associated with birth defects and cancer and produced the fundamental discovery that gender in mammals is determined by the Y-chromosome.