Abstract
Biobanks containing tissue and other biological samples from many model organisms provide easy and faster access to ex vivo resources for a wide-range of research programmes. For all laboratory animals, collecting and preserving tissue at post-mortem is an effective way of maximising the benefits of individual animals and potentially reducing the numbers required for experimentation in the future. For primate tissues, biobanks represent the scarcest of these resources but quite possibly those most valuable for preclinical and translation studies.
Highlights
Archives of model organism tissues have been vital for a multitude of studies including those elucidating biological mechanisms (Adissu et al 2014) and provide the potential for much wider, complex, comparative translational studies (Brubaker and Lauffenburger 2020)
Careful evaluation of the long-term resources needed to support archives as well as the investment in the set-up and ongoing sample collection need to be balanced against how irreplaceable the samples are and the benefits in terms of reducing animal numbers
Unlike other biobanks from animals such as the mouse, primate biobanks represent more diverse and non-standardised samples whose availability often changes as unique samples are used
Summary
Archives of model organism tissues have been vital for a multitude of studies including those elucidating biological mechanisms (Adissu et al 2014) and provide the potential for much wider, complex, comparative translational studies (Brubaker and Lauffenburger 2020). Establishing and curating tissue collection is a significant undertaking. Careful evaluation of the long-term resources needed to support archives as well as the investment in the set-up and ongoing sample collection need to be balanced against how irreplaceable the samples are and the benefits in terms of reducing animal numbers. The benefits greatly outweigh the cost for repositories of many specific disease tissues (https://searchbreast.org), tissue from large fundamental biology projects (www.mousephenotype.org) and samples from the least common, most sensitive laboratory animal species such as non-human primates
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