The Mary Lyon Centre’s tenth year was celebrated by staff on the 3rd July with tea, cakes and cricket. Staff from MRC Harwell sat, chatted and enjoyed the sun with cake and drinks before getting kitted up for cricket.
Mary Lyon Centre celebrates a decade The Mary Lyon Centre’s tenth year was celebrated by staff on the 3rd July with tea, cakes and cricket. Dr Sara Wells, director of the Mary Lyon Centre (MLC), opened the event with a speech about all that the MLC has achieved over the last ten years. An assortment of cakes and drinks were laid out, and MLC and MGU staff sat, chatted and enjoyed the sun before getting kitted up for cricket. It was a wonderfully sunny day, and the perfect way to celebrate a decade of the MLC. The MLC is a specific pathogen free (SPF) facility which was specially built to provide the ideal conditions to house mice for genetic research. The centre was originally established in 2004, named after Dr Mary Lyon in recognition of her discovery of X chromosome inactivation. Over the last decade, the MLC has been instrumental in both supporting research at MRC Harwell and offering a wide range of services, including specialised techniques, mouse lines and access to genetic archives, for the wider scientific community. MRC Harwell is part of many large-scale projects, including the Harwell Ageing Screen, which aims to investigate the underlying genetic basis of ageing and age-related conditions, and the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC), which seeks to determine the function of 20,000 genes through the generation and systematic phenotyping of knockout mice. This is an enormous task, and the Mary Lyon Centre has played a central role in breeding and characterising Harwell’s mouse lines. The MLC has built a dedicated community of staff over the last ten years, who have worked hard to make the centre thrive. We look forward to the next ten years of the MLC, and hope that it will bring just as much success as the first decade.
