Moustra Officially Launches: Unlocking Powerful Mouse Colony Management for Everyone!
We’re thrilled to announce that Moustra, the next-generation mouse colony management platform for research labs, is now officially live!
🧪 30-Day Free Trial for All Users
To celebrate our launch, all users have been upgraded to a 30-day free trial. That means full access to all features, including:
- 🧬 Breeding and animal management
- 🖱️ Drag-and-drop Lab View interface
- 📊 AI-powered recommendations
- 📁 Seamless record keeping
No limitations. No credit card required. Just log in and explore everything Moustra has to offer.
💰 Transparent Pricing: Just $10/Month
After your free trial, Moustra Professional is available at a clear and affordable rate of $10 per user/month.
- ✅ No hidden fees
- ✅ No surprise charges
- ✅ Cancel anytime
Need more than 15 users? Contact us at admin@moustra.com and we’ll set up a plan that fits your lab.
🎁 1-Year Free Promo for Beta Users
As a thank-you to our early supporters, we’ve sent out a 1-year free promotion code to all beta users. Your feedback and trust helped shape Moustra into the tool it is today — we couldn’t have done it without you.
🧠 Why Labs Choose Moustra
- ✅ Intuitive and fast interface for effortless colony management
- ✅ Smart features to reduce errors and save time
- ✅ Works in the cloud — access your data from anywhere
- ✅ Built for researchers, by researchers
What Makes Moustra Different from Traditional Colony Management
For decades, research labs have managed mouse colonies using a patchwork of spreadsheets, binder-based cage cards, and legacy software that was never designed for modern workflows. Moustra was built from the ground up to address the real pain points that colony managers, principal investigators, and lab technicians face every day.
The core philosophy behind Moustra is straightforward: colony management software should save you time, not create more work. Every feature we built was informed by direct feedback from working researchers who told us what frustrated them most about existing tools. The result is a platform that feels intuitive from the first login, whether you manage 50 cages or 5,000.
Lab View: Your Colony at a Glance
One of the features researchers notice first is Lab View, our drag-and-drop visual interface that mirrors how your physical lab is actually organized. Instead of navigating nested menus or scrolling through flat tables, you see your racks, cages, and animals arranged spatially. Need to transfer an animal between cages? Drag it. Want to set up a new breeding pair? Drop the animals into a mating cage. The interface responds the way you think, which means less training time for new lab members and fewer clicks for experienced users.
Lab View also provides instant visual status indicators. Color-coded cage cards show you at a glance which cages have active matings, which litters are approaching weaning age, and which animals need genotyping. A genetics lab running 200 cages told us they cut their morning colony check from 45 minutes to 15 minutes simply by switching to Lab View.
AI-Powered Colony Intelligence with Cheese AI
Moustra is the only colony management platform with a built-in AI assistant. Cheese AI understands natural language questions about your colony data. Instead of building complex filter queries or exporting data to analyze in a separate tool, you can ask questions like "Which breeding pairs haven't produced a litter in 60 days?" or "Show me all animals carrying the Cre allele that are older than 8 weeks."
Cheese AI is not a generic chatbot. It is trained specifically on mouse colony management concepts, understands genotype notation, knows the difference between hemizygous and homozygous designations, and can reason about breeding strategies. When your IACUC inspector asks for animal usage records broken down by protocol number, Cheese AI can pull that report in seconds.
Mobile Access for On-the-Go Colony Checks
Research does not happen exclusively at a desk. Moustra's mobile app lets you scan cage barcodes, update animal records, and check breeding status directly from the animal facility. Technicians performing daily health checks can record observations on their phone without carrying a laptop into the vivarium. The mobile app syncs in real time with the web platform, so updates made at the cage are instantly visible to the entire team.
Built for Compliance and Record Keeping
Regulatory compliance is non-negotiable in animal research. Moustra automatically maintains audit trails for every change made to animal records, cage assignments, and breeding events. When your institution requires documentation for IACUC protocol renewals, annual reports, or veterinary inspections, the data is already organized and exportable. You do not need to spend days reconstructing records from fragmented spreadsheets before a compliance review.
Every animal record in Moustra captures the full lifecycle: birth date, parents, genotype, cage history, experimental assignments, and endpoint. This level of traceability means you can answer questions like "What happened to animal M-2847?" with a few clicks rather than a few hours of digging through old files.
How Labs Are Using Moustra Today
Since our beta period, labs across universities, medical centers, and biotech companies have adopted Moustra for a range of colony sizes and research focuses.
Neuroscience labs use Moustra to manage complex multi-allelic crosses, tracking animals that carry three or four transgenes simultaneously. The breeding calculator helps them plan crosses that maximize the probability of producing the desired genotype combination while minimizing unnecessary animals.
Immunology groups rely on Moustra's notification system to stay on top of timed matings and experimental windows. When a litter is born to a critical breeding pair, the assigned researcher gets an immediate alert rather than discovering the litter during a routine cage check days later.
Core facilities that manage colonies for multiple investigators appreciate Moustra's multi-lab support. Each PI can see only their own animals while facility managers maintain oversight of the entire operation. Billing, census reports, and per-diem tracking become straightforward instead of a monthly headache.
Small labs with a single researcher managing 30 to 50 cages benefit from the free solo plan. You get the same AI features, the same Lab View, and the same mobile access as larger teams. There is no stripped-down "basic" tier that forces you to upgrade for essential functionality.
Getting Started Takes Minutes, Not Days
One of the most common complaints about colony management software is the onboarding process. Legacy platforms often require institutional IT involvement, server configuration, or multi-day training sessions. Moustra is a cloud-based platform. You sign up, log in, and start adding your colony data immediately.
For labs migrating from spreadsheets or another platform, our AI Migration tool can import your existing Excel files automatically. Upload your spreadsheet, and Moustra's AI maps your columns to the correct fields, validates the data, and creates all your animal, cage, and strain records in one step. Labs that previously spent a week migrating data now complete the process in under an hour.
Notifications That Keep Your Entire Team Aligned
Research colonies are team efforts. Technicians handle daily cage checks, graduate students manage breeding for their specific projects, and principal investigators need high-level oversight of animal usage and costs. Moustra's notification system was designed around these overlapping responsibilities.
You can receive colony alerts through email, Slack integration, or both. When a cage status changes, a litter is recorded, or a mating pair is set up, the relevant team members are notified immediately. Slack integration is especially powerful for labs that already use Slack as their primary communication tool. Colony updates flow into a dedicated channel where the team can discuss and act on them in real time, rather than waiting for the next lab meeting to learn that a critical breeding pair was separated or a litter was born overnight.
For labs that prefer email, Moustra sends formatted summaries of colony activity. You control the frequency and the types of events that trigger notifications, so you receive only the information that matters to your workflow without drowning in alerts about routine changes.
Transparent Pricing with No Hidden Costs
We believe the cost of colony management software should be predictable and fair. Moustra Professional is $10 per user per month, billed monthly, with tax included. There are no annual contracts, no tiered feature gates, and no hidden charges for data storage or exports. Solo researchers use Moustra completely free with full access to every feature, including Cheese AI, Lab View, and the mobile app. If your lab grows and you need team access, upgrading is a single click in your account settings.
Compare this to legacy platforms that require annual commitments starting at hundreds of dollars, charge extra for features that should be standard, and hide pricing behind sales call request forms. We publish our pricing on our website because we are confident in the value Moustra delivers at every price point.
Security and Compliance from Day One
Animal research data carries real compliance obligations. Moustra stores all data in encrypted cloud infrastructure with automatic daily backups. Every change to an animal record, cage assignment, or breeding event is logged with a timestamp and the authenticated user identity, creating the complete audit trail your IACUC committee expects during protocol reviews and facility inspections.
Authentication is handled through Auth0 with support for Microsoft and Google institutional logins, so your lab benefits from enterprise-grade security without managing separate credential databases. For labs subject to NIH data management requirements or institutional data governance policies, Moustra's architecture provides a defensible, auditable record-keeping system that satisfies compliance reviewers without requiring manual log maintenance or end-of-quarter data reconstruction.
Ready to simplify your mouse colony management? Start your free Moustra trial today, or schedule a demo to see it run against your lab's workflow.
Thank you for being part of the Moustra journey.
