The RIKEN BRC was established in January 2001 as a global not-for-profit bioresource center providing biological materials, technical services, and educational programs to private enterprises and academic organizations around the world.    The mouse resource is part of the National BioResource Project (NBRP) for more than 20 species including animals, plants, microbes, cell lines and DNA.    NBRP was founded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.
The mouse is the most useful and important experimental animal in biomedical research and is one of the major resources in RIKEN BRC. The overall goal of the experimental animal division is to collect valuable mouse strains and distribute high-quality, well-characterized inbred, mutant and genetically engineered mice to investigators.    To this end, we shall select and collect mice strains important to the biomedical research community; rederive mice to a specific pathogen-free state; cryopreserve gametes and embryos; perform genotyping, phenotyping and infectious-disease monitoring to ensure the quality of the mice; and distribute mice to investigators as live mice, cryopreserved embryos or sperms.