Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center

The Yale MMPC Animal Core provides a centralized facility for coordinating receiving, screening, and monitoring mice from outside investigators. Residence through the Yale MMPC Animal Core has been designed to minimize the quarantine period, while allowing phenotyping tests to commence while the mice are in quarantine. The end result is that most mice can be phenotyped at the appropriate age or weight following transfer to Yale, which is a critical determinant when performing metabolic studies. The scheduling of the shipment of mice from extramural clients will be timed and orchestrated by the Yale MMPC Administrative Core working in close coordination with the Yale MMPC Animal Core and the Yale MMPC Phenotyping Core.

The overall objective of the Yale Metabolic Phenotyping in Live Models of Obesity and Diabetes (MMPC) Animal Core is to provide state-of-the-art husbandry, health care, expedited quarantine, and biosecure housing and procedure space for assessing and maintaining mice submitted for phenotyping. The MMPC Animal Core will continue to reside within the Yale Animal Resources Center (YARC) and will build on the experience gained from metabolic phenotyping > 10,000 mice as the Animal Core for Yale’s Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center (MMPC).

The Yale MMPC Phenotyping Core empowers Yale MMPC clients with access to unique metabolic phenotyping services that provides them with the means to characterize the metabolic changes in their particular mouse models of complex metabolic disease using established state-of-the-art methodology.

It is anticipated that the results generated by the Yale MMPC will lead to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of diabetes and obesity and their related metabolic complications and lead to new therapies. Ultimately, the insights generated from in vivo metabolic phenotyping in mouse models will facilitate the development of precision medicine approaches targeting metabolic pathophysiology and its downstream complications.

The Yale MMPC Phenotyping Core structure is comprised of four subcores:

The aim of the Metabolic Imaging Sub-Core is to offer investigators the ability to assess whole-body fat and lean body mass by 1 H MRS/MRI at 11.7T, and 8.4T as well as several new and exciting PET imaging modalities for their mice.

The aim of Islet Cell Biology Sub-Core is to offer researchers advanced techniques to assess insulin secretion and stable isotope-traced metabolic flux rates in isolated islets.

The Thermometabolism Sub-Core will perform comprehensive respirometry and behavioral analyses in awake mice at a range of temperatures from 4-30°C.

The Functional Cardiac Metabolism Sub-Core will use state-of-the-art surgical models of cardiac pathophysiology combined with isotope tracer analysis of cardiac substrate metabolism to facilitate studies to understand how in vivo atrial and ventricular substrate metabolism affects outcomes under conditions of cardiac pathophysiology (diabetic heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation).