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Animal Reproductive Biology Group

Animal Research Facilities

The Animal Sciences Research Center (ASRC) is a state-of-the-art animal research facility that covers five acres on the southeast corner of the MU campus.

This unique research environment combines laboratories, housing and surgery suites in the same building. There are individual rooms for swine, sheep and cattle, large and small animal surgeries, large animal environmental chambers (Brody Climatology Lab), small animal rooms and isolation rooms.

The Animal Reproductive Biology Group resides in two wings of the ASRC. There is a complete range of equipment for recombinant DNA research, transgenesis, genomics, proteomics and whole animal research. Each laboratory is networked to common software resources and databases.

A trained computer programmer is available for consultation and data processing. The statistics department maintains an outpost within the ASRC that is staffed by a consultant trained in microarray analyses.

Equipment and resources available to the group include mini-labs for isolating oocytes from slaughterhouse ovaries; standard bacterial and non-bacterial incubators, hoods and tissue culture rooms; ancillary equipment, including inverted microscopes with micromanipulators, dissecting microscopes and lights microscopes with interference contrast optics and fluorescence capabilities; individual laboratories with blood hormone radioimmunoassays; a separate laboratory for performing radioiodinations; pipetting stations to process large-batch RIA samples; and two scintillation and gamma counters with data reduction packages. With these, members of the group routinely culture mouse, cattle and swine embryos, as well as hybridoma lines and explants of tissues.

The College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources' Farms and Centers include a beef unit of about 200 beef cows and associated young stock, a confinement swine unit of about 600 pigs, the pasture swine unit of about 400 pigs, the sheep unit of about 150 sheep and the Dairy Research Center with about 230 dairy cows and associated young stock. These facilities are all located within 12 miles of the MU campus.

Each facility is supervised by production specialists within the Animal Sciences Division and managed by on-farm research specialists. MU also operates outlying centers throughout Missouri. These centers include the Greenley Research Center with 100 cows, the Thompson Farm with 250 cows and the Forage Systems Research Center with 300 cows.