Boston Children’s Hospital – Zetter Lab

Vladimir Vrbanac, DVM
Boston Children’s Hospital – Zetter Lab

Dear Ed,

I would like to congratulate you for the purchase of the new small rodent racks. I find this Optimice system superior in more than one way than the previous systems that we had in the animal rooms. Next to most obvious advantages, like lager front side of the cages, and increased visibility of mice and its behavior, there are some other, less obvious aspects.

I work with immunocompromised animals, which require some special attention to the sterility of the procedures. The inner side of the cage lid is a very convenient large sterile surface for short-term manipulation of the mice. By using it, I don’t have to use special table covers, procedures are faster, I save the time, and my lab saves the money.

Also, feeders, when put horizontally on the rack, provide good tunnel-like space that satisfy mice instinct to go in protected spaces, so they do not wander around during the manipulations, but stay grouped at one place.

In the beginning, some investigators were complaining because of the carousel nature of the rack. The cages were every time on the same place as they left them. We circumvented that problem by using the set of 24 Sharpies, and now every experiment is marked by different color, which improved ease of finding the cages very much, even compared with the previous, shelf-like rack systems.

Also, being able to put more animals in one room helps us too, as we don’t have to wander from room to room, but we have our animals concentrated in one room.

For all these reasons I would like to thank you for providing new cage systems in our facility.