About the Mary Lyon Centre

The UK’s national facility for mouse genetics and the use of mouse models for the preclinical study of human disease.

The MLC is based at Harwell, a research and innovation supercampus home to cutting-edge scientific instruments, institutes, businesses, and expert teams advancing knowledge and finding solutions.
Founded in 1946 as a hub for pioneering technology, our Oxfordshire campus now hosts over 7,000 scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and technicians—all focused on solving complex problems. We design, build and use extraordinary scientific equipment including particle accelerators that reveal the subatomic structure of materials, X-ray beams brighter than the sun for examining living cells, quantum computers that could revolutionise whole industries, and space simulation chambers for testing satellites before launch.

Proximity sparks unexpected collaborations, breaks down barriers, and connects ideas with people who can implement them, resulting in faster innovation and solutions that wouldn’t emerge in isolation. From the materials in your smartphone to the satellites overhead, from life-saving medicines to the clean energy grid, science, technologies and businesses born at Harwell boost the economy and improve billions of lives.

The genetic basis of human disease

Most human diseases have a significant genetic component. Many variants in our DNA predispose us to disease, yet our knowledge of these changes in our DNA, and how they cause disease, is limited. Although outwardly a mouse looks very different to a human, its development, physiology and biochemistry are very similar. Studying genes in mice can therefore reveal important insights into the functions of genes in humans and mouse models of disease can be remarkably similar to their human equivalent, helping us investigate how a disease develops and how we may be able to treat or prevent it.

The Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell offers a wide range of services to researchers around the world. Services include free archiving of mouse lines to protect them for future use, distribution of mouse lines from the Archive, breeding and phenotyping of genetically altered mice, and genome engineering services to generate new mouse models. MRC Harwell is also home to the Advance training centre, which delivers our world-class practical and theoretical training courses and has labs and training rooms available to hire.

The health and welfare of our animals is of paramount importance.

The Mary Lyon Centre is proactively committed to implementing the 3Rs – the refinement, reduction, and replacement of the use of animals in research. Our objective is to deliver knowledge that will hopefully benefit the lives of people in the future, but we do so with an awareness that we have commitments to the animals in our care, and commitments to both minimising their pain and suffering and to improving their welfare.

Animal welfare at the MLC