The objective of the University of Illinois at Chicago's """"""""UIC Animal Facility Improvement Grant"""""""" is to renovate and expand the animal facility to meet the increasing demand of animal use for vision related research, which cannot be accommodated by the institution's centralized animal facility. This objective will be achieved by renovating and enhancing the satellite animal facility in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences to create an animal housing environment essential for performing vision related studies. Specifically, a 900 sq. ft. room in the Lions of Illinois Eye Research Institute (LIERI) will be re-constructed to meet the recommendations of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (Guide) for housing rodents. The room will be partitioned into several compartments, a light-controlled compartment for light sensitive experiments, an environmentally controlled compartment for establishing dry-eye disease animal models, and a hypoxia compartment for generating oxygen related eye disease animal models. The department will also centralize existing vision research instrumentation used to monitor and measure visual performance functions in living animals in areas contiguous to the animal holding areas. The proposed renovation will ensure the continued compliance of the campus-wide animal care program with the recommendations of the Guide and further strengthen the quality of the overall program in terms of housing, care and veterinary oversight, while at the same time creating an ideal environment to facilitate vision research at UIC. In addition, a centralized satellite animal facility for vision research will minimize the transportation of animals and potential microbial contamination of both experimental animals and animals maintained in the rodent colonies of the institution's centralized animal facility.
