Early next year, Canada will open the doors on what it hopes will become a one-stop shop for mouse geneticists. The Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics (TCP) will house a range of imaging instruments, Canada's largest mouse colony and a cryobank, which together should make it one of the top locations for studying mouse models of human disease.

Affectionately nicknamed the mouse house, the Can$63-million (US$56-million) building will play host to some 300 researchers. They will generate mutant mice and work on phenotyping, behavioural analysis, imaging pathology and the cryopreservation of tissues. The human diseases that can be investigated using the mouse models range from diabetes and cancer to childhood conditions and women's health issues.

The TCP will become the new home to the mouse strains currently housed at its four sponsors: Mount Sinai Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, St Michael's Hospital and the University Health Network. This will free up space at the hospitals for other research.

But few of the researchers at these institutes will follow their rodent charges to the Toronto facility. Instead, the TCP aims to be a hub of tools, technologies and services — previously available only on a piecemeal basis — and will house up to 200,000 mice.

At the TCP's core lies the Mouse Imaging Centre. Sealed in a room lined with 130 tonnes of steel is a 7.3-tesla magnetic resonance imaging machine that has been custom developed to image up to 19 live mice at a time. It also features optical projection tomography machines, which will allow researchers to create high-resolution three-dimensional images of transparent tissues, such as mouse embryos.

And at the Canadian Mouse Mutant Repository, sperm, ovaries, embryos and other non-germline tissue DNA will be held in cryopreservation. Colin McKerlie, who will oversee the repository and is currently the TCP's interim chief executive, is enthusiastic about the ways in which the tissue bank will help researchers. As well as being a useful resource, it should allow researchers to participate in international initiatives, he says.

With its state-of-the-art facilities, the opening of the TCP should have its investigators grinning like cats, as the first mice move in.