As part of a continuing commitment to establish and maintain an exemplary laboratory animal care and use program the University of Minnesota proposes to upgrade three animal care facilities in this application. Alterations are renovations are planned for two facilities in the Medical School and a third facility that serves a multidisciplinary group of investigators in the Food Science and Nutrition program. The Medical School component involves (1) Five Basic Sciences Departments' research programs involving 26 principal investigators in the Jackson-Owre Addition (JOA) a 30 year old animal care facility in need of major undating and (2) the Cardiovascular Research Center (CRC) dog holding area which suffers design features which must be remedied to become compliant with existing standards. The JOA animal care facility is well designed and structurally sound but after 30 years of heavy use needs updating including new ceilings, removal of inappropriate casework, a new ventilation system and a cage washer. Also, proposed is alteration of a dog holding room in the Cardiovascular Research Center (CRC) where over 400 dogs are used annually in chronic survival surgical research. In the CRC we plan to remove unnecessary divider walls, refinish the floors and walls and replace cages with spacious pens. Finally we seek to update our nutrition research animal facility (where for 30 years cages and racks have been hand washed) by altering a portion of the facility as a cage wash area and by installing a cabinet washer. The alterations and renovations and the equipment purchases will affect animal care facilities used by 39 principal investigators with sponsored animal research programs of approximately $6.5 million annually of which 81% is from the NIH. All the animal care facilities (including those described in this application, on the Twin Cities Campus of the University of Minnesota have been incorporated into a new centralized management program administered by laboratory animal professionals in the Department of Research Animal Resources.
