Welcome to the virtual tour of the Institute’s Biological Support Unit (BSU). This information will help you navigate the tour. Our goal is to ensure transparency about the highly regulated work conducted here, show you how the facility operates and to demonstrate how we uphold the highest standards of animal welfare.
Tour overview
We encourage you to explore the tour at your own pace. The BSU is divided into different areas, each with a specific role in ensuring research integrity and animal welfare. During the tour, you will be able to explore:
- the Experimental Unit – Where research studies are conducted under carefully controlled conditions.
- the GM-Transgenic Unit – Housing genetically modified mice in high-health status environments.
- the Containment & Import Unit – Ensuring that animals from external sources are safely quarantined.
- Central Services – Providing sterilization, cage cleaning, and water purification.
- Administrative Areas – Offices for regulatory oversight and compliance.
We recommend that you click the icon in the top right corner of the tour view to open this in a new browser tab. To start the tour, click the white arrow. During the tour look out for ⓘ information buttons to learn more about each area and the videos to see key aspects of animal care.
You can explore the facility in any order you would like but we have also provided a few recommended routes in our tour notes to help you get started and to give an idea of what topics you might encounter in each unit.
- Recommended Route 1 – How the BSU supports the Institute’s science
- Recommended Route 2 – How our work is regulated and what we do to reduce, refine and replace mouse models in our work
- Recommended Route 3 – How we keep the unit running and get things in and out of the facility