JAX Colony Management System Overview
The Jackson Laboratory's Colony Management System (JCMS) is a multi-user relational database management system for managing animal colonies in a research environment. It was initially developed in response to increased demand within The Jackson Laboratory for a system that would execute the core functionality of colony management from an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
Since its initial release in 1999, JCMS has been widely used within The Jackson Laboratory and adopted by a number of outside institutions. With the increased user community came requests for more features. Consequently, JCMS has been continually improved through community input, and continues to evolve with respect to functionality and ease of use.
Some of the salient features that JCMS offers are:
- Tracking animal status
- Line viability monitoring
- Tracking of animal pedigree
- Cage card printing
- Colony status reports
- Mouse-room work reports
- Genotype logging
- Creating mating records
- Tracking plug dates
- Creating litter records
- Animal pen management
- Experimental data tracking
- Bulk data entry
- Advanced database queries
- Comprehensive mouse sample tracking
- Support for handheld devices
JCMS has an underlying data model that is independent of any specific database management system technology. Software engineers in Computational Sciences worked closely with the scientific research staff to derive a data model that was comprehensive yet flexible enough to fully satisfy the requirements of multiple research labs.
In its current form, JCMS runs as a Microsoft Access® application with either an Access or MySQL database backend.
End user support is provided through our moderated listserv discussion group (you will have the option of joining the group when you download the software), and through our community discussion forum.
