Skeletal/Muscular Diseases

The Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell has a range of sophisticated equipment for measuring various subtle aspects of muscle coordination, gait, and changes in muscle tone that has enabled us to study neuromuscular function and ataxia.

Building a broad picture of the skeletal-muscular system

We have a range of equipment for assessing activity and mobility.

This includes the Phenomaster Wheel Running setup, where mice acclimatised to a cage with a wheel have the wheel changed to one with fewer rungs and altered gaps between rungs to present a significant challenge, and equipment for gait analysis in which mice walking along a platform under red light distort green LED lights where their feet contact the walkway such that information about their movements can be extracted from recorded videos in an automated process.

We can also observe locomotion of mice in their home-cage environment using our automated phenotyping platform. For more information, please visit the Behavioural and Neurological Phenotyping and Neuromuscular Phenotyping sections of the In Vivo Phenotyping page.

Our Embryo Phenotyping team has extensive experience with analysing anatomy and dysmorphology in embryos ranging from E9.5 to E18.5, which could help to characterise developmental abnormalities in your disease of interest.

If you are looking to generate a new genetic mouse model of a skeletal or muscular disease, we can support you with this process, whether your project requires simple deletions or point mutations or generation of more complex alleles.

Think we can help with your next project?