Introducing Moustra
Introducing Moustra
We're thrilled to announce the launch of Moustra, a comprehensive platform designed specifically for mouse colony management in research laboratories. Born from the frustration of researchers spending countless hours on administrative tasks rather than focusing on groundbreaking discoveries, Moustra represents a paradigm shift in how laboratories manage their mouse colonies.
The Problem We're Solving
Our platform addresses the common pain points that researchers face daily:
- Tracking breeding schedules
- Managing genetic lineages
- Monitoring health records
- Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements
Anyone who has managed a mouse colony knows how quickly administrative overhead spirals. A typical neuroscience lab running 15 Cre driver lines might maintain 200 or more active cages at any given time. Each cage needs regular wellness checks, litter tracking, genotype records, and weaning schedules. When that information lives in a patchwork of spreadsheets, whiteboard notes, and sticky labels on cage cards, mistakes are inevitable. Pups get weaned late, breeding pairs are set up with the wrong genotypes, and months of backcrossing work can be lost to a single data-entry error.
We built Moustra because we lived this problem firsthand. Our founding team includes researchers who spent years working inside the Texas Medical Center, watching talented scientists lose entire afternoons reconciling cage counts with spreadsheet rows. The cost is not just wasted time; it is wasted grant funding, delayed publications, and compromised animal welfare.
What Sets Moustra Apart
What sets Moustra apart is its intuitive design, created by scientists for scientists, ensuring that every feature aligns with real laboratory workflows.
Key Features Include:
- Automated breeding schedule management
- Comprehensive genetic tracking
- Integrated health monitoring
- Seamless compliance reporting
- AI-powered suggestions to optimize colony management
Breeding Management That Matches How You Actually Work
Setting up a new breeding pair in Moustra takes seconds, not minutes. Select the dam and sire from your colony roster, confirm the genotypes, and the system automatically calculates expected litter dates, projected wean windows, and even flags potential inbreeding concerns based on your pedigree data. When pups arrive, you record the litter with a few taps on your phone right at the cage, and Moustra immediately schedules tail-tip reminders, genotyping deadlines, and the P21 wean date.
For labs running timed matings, the platform tracks plug dates and lets you set custom gestational timelines per strain. If you are working with a line that consistently delivers at E19 rather than the standard E19.5, Moustra learns that pattern and adjusts future projections accordingly.
Genetic Lineage Tracking Without the Headaches
Moustra stores your entire pedigree tree in a searchable, visual format. Every animal links to its parents, siblings, and offspring, so tracing a specific allele through six generations of backcrossing is a simple click rather than an hour of cross-referencing spreadsheets. The platform supports complex genotype nomenclature including conditional alleles, reporter constructs, and multi-transgenic combinations. You can filter your entire colony by genotype in real time, answering questions like "How many homozygous floxed animals do I have that are also Cre-positive?" in seconds.
Health Monitoring and Veterinary Integration
Every observation, from a routine body-condition score to a veterinary treatment note, is timestamped and attached to the individual animal record. If IACUC reviewers request a health history for a specific cohort, you can generate the report in one click. Moustra also supports configurable health scoring rubrics, so your lab can define exactly what a body-condition score of 2 means for your specific strains, and the system alerts you when any animal drops below your threshold.
Compliance and Regulatory Reporting
IACUC protocols, animal usage numbers, and census reports are generated automatically from your live colony data. No more end-of-quarter scrambles to count how many animals were used under each protocol. Moustra tracks protocol assignments at the individual animal level and rolls up the numbers into the exact format your institution requires. When your annual renewal is due, the data is already there, accurate and auditable.
Built for Mobile, Designed for the Vivarium
Researchers do not sit at desks when they manage their colonies. They stand in front of racks in the vivarium, often wearing gloves and gowns. Moustra's mobile app is designed for exactly this environment. Large tap targets, barcode scanning for cage identification, and offline capability mean you can record observations even when the vivarium Wi-Fi is unreliable. Data syncs automatically when connectivity returns.
The barcode scanning feature alone saves significant time. Instead of manually searching for a cage ID, you scan the barcode on the cage card and the full record appears instantly: current occupants, genotypes, breeding status, last health check, and upcoming tasks. Labs that have adopted barcode scanning report cutting their cage-side data entry time by more than half.
Notifications That Keep Your Colony on Track
Moustra's notification engine runs continuously in the background, monitoring every cage in your colony for upcoming deadlines and potential issues. Daily email digests summarize what needs attention: cages due for weaning, breeding pairs approaching retirement age, genotyping results that are overdue, and health observations that need follow-up. Push notifications on the mobile app provide real-time alerts for urgent situations, such as a cage that has exceeded its maximum occupancy or an animal whose body condition score has dropped below your defined threshold.
The notification system is fully configurable. You control which events trigger alerts, who receives them, and how far in advance warnings are sent. A PI might want a weekly summary, while the technician managing day-to-day operations might prefer daily task lists with same-day push alerts.
Collaboration Across Your Entire Team
A modern research lab is a team effort. PIs, postdocs, graduate students, technicians, and undergraduate assistants all interact with the colony, and keeping everyone coordinated is a challenge that spreadsheets cannot solve. Moustra provides role-based access controls that let each team member see and do exactly what their role requires. Technicians can enter observations and update cage records. Graduate students can manage the strains assigned to their projects. PIs retain oversight of the entire colony with administrative controls.
Activity logs show who did what and when, creating transparency that prevents duplicated effort and ensures accountability. When a technician weans a cage at 8 a.m., the graduate student arriving at 10 a.m. sees the completed task immediately rather than repeating the work.
Our Location Advantage
Based in the Texas Medical Center, we understand the unique challenges faced by modern research institutions. Our proximity to leading laboratories allows us to continuously refine our platform based on real-world feedback from active researchers.
We work closely with labs ranging from small academic groups managing a single strain to core facilities overseeing thousands of cages across multiple investigators. That diversity of use cases has shaped Moustra into a platform that scales gracefully, whether you have 10 cages or 10,000.
AI-Powered Insights with Cheese AI
Moustra includes Cheese AI, a conversational assistant that understands your colony data at a granular level. Instead of navigating through filters and reports, you can simply ask questions in natural language. "How many homozygous females do I have in the ROSA26 line?" returns an instant, accurate answer pulled from your live database. "Which breeding pairs have not produced a litter in the last 40 days?" surfaces underperformers that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Cheese AI also helps with planning. Tell it "I need 25 male knockouts by October 1" and it will calculate how many breeding pairs you need running, when to set them up, and whether your current colony can meet the demand. This kind of forward-looking analysis used to require an experienced colony manager with deep institutional knowledge; now it is available to every member of your team.
Designed for Every Scale of Research
Whether you are a single PI managing one transgenic line for a focused behavioral study or a core facility director overseeing 50 strains across a dozen investigators, Moustra adapts to your scale. Small labs benefit from the simplicity of a clean interface that does not overwhelm with enterprise features they will never use. Large facilities benefit from the administrative tools, multi-investigator views, and aggregate reporting capabilities that keep a complex operation running smoothly. The same platform serves both, and you can grow from one to the other without migrating data or retraining your team.
Getting Started Is Simple
Creating your Moustra account takes minutes, and you can begin entering data immediately. For labs migrating from spreadsheets, our import tool maps your existing columns to Moustra's data model and flags inconsistencies during the transfer. Most labs complete the migration in a single afternoon and never look back. Comprehensive documentation at docs.moustra.com provides step-by-step guides with screenshots for every workflow, from registering your first animal to generating a quarterly compliance report.
Moustra offers a free Starter plan with full access to core features, so you can evaluate the platform with real data before committing to a paid tier. There are no trial periods, no feature gates on the essentials, and no setup fees.
Security and Data Ownership
Your colony data is sensitive intellectual property. Moustra uses end-to-end encryption, role-based access controls, and SOC 2-aligned infrastructure to keep your data secure. You always retain full ownership of your data, and you can export your entire colony database at any time in standard formats. We will never sell or share your research data.
Join the Revolution
Join us as we transform mouse colony management and help scientists focus on what they do best: making breakthrough discoveries that advance human health and scientific understanding.