MiceManager 26.3.7
It is been a while since our last update, and for good reason. Behind the scenes, we have been hard at work rethinking, refining, and building the next evolution of our lab mice management platform. Now, as we step into 2026, we are excited to kick off the new year with a wave of powerful improvements and long-awaited features designed to make your daily lab workflows smoother, smarter, and more reliable.
This new MiceManager release introduces automatic handling of breeding mice, reducing manual tracking and minimizing errors in colony management. We are also launching a completely redesigned genetic selector, making it faster and more intuitive to define and manage complex genotypes. Alongside these major upgrades, we have introduced a more user-friendly note system, allowing better documentation and collaboration across teams.
But that is not all. This update also brings performance optimizations, significant security improvements, and numerous bug fixes and small enhancements across the platform. While some changes may seem subtle, they collectively deliver a more stable, faster, and more secure experience.
Mail notifications
We have also introduced a new mail notification system designed to keep you better informed about what is happening on the platform. This new mechanism allows the application to be more proactive and verbose, ensuring that important information reaches users more quickly. For now, notifications primarily focus on system-related events, helping users stay aware of important changes, updates, or actions that may impact their workflow.
This improvement also lays the groundwork for future notification triggers, such as breeding updates, upcoming weaning dates, genotype results, or other colony-related events. As always, notifications remain fully configurable, allowing users to choose how and when they want to be alerted by MiceManager. This new foundation prepares the platform for more advanced, user-driven alerts, helping you stay informed and react faster as your colony evolves.
Breeding Mice handling
Another major improvement in this release is the automatic handling of breeding mice, designed to make colony management safer and more reliable. Mice assigned to breeding are now automatically reserved by the system, preventing accidental misuse (such as selecting breeders for experiments while they are still needed for reproduction).
The platform also intelligently releases animals at the appropriate time, for example releasing males once breeding is completed, and females after delivery, reducing the need for manual intervention and minimizing errors.
In addition, breeding mice are now automatically excluded from the Optimal Genetic Cross Solver, ensuring that only available animals are considered when planning new crosses to reach desired genotypes. Together, these improvements help streamline breeding workflows, protect valuable animals, and maintain more accurate colony planning.
Notes
We have also refactored the notes system for mice to make it simpler, more flexible, and closer to a “post-it” style experience. The new design encourages quick annotations and lightweight tracking of important information, making it easier to capture observations, reminders, or special conditions without adding unnecessary complexity.
In addition, notes now support attachments, allowing users to include documents, images, or other relevant files directly alongside their comments. This improvement makes notes more practical for day-to-day lab work, helping teams centralize contextual information and keep everything related to a mouse easily accessible.
Behind the Scenes
While many of the changes in this release are visible on the surface, we have also been busy doing some serious behind-the-scenes engineering to make the platform more robust, scalable, and future-proof. First, we have moved away from a third-party licensing server and introduced cryptographic license files, giving us greater reliability and paving the way for better interoperability between instances. This change not only reduces external dependencies but also prepares the platform for more flexible deployment scenarios.
Security has also received a major upgrade. We have implemented exhaustive read and write permissions with contextual access control, allowing for more precise and secure data handling across the platform. At the same time, we optimized several core algorithms to reduce server peak load, which means we can now increase data limits without additional infrastructure costs, a win-win for performance and scalability.
Finally, we have taken a significant step forward in cybersecurity maturity. We now systematically generate and monitor SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) to quickly identify vulnerabilities and track dependencies. This enables us to proactively detect CVEs and progressively adopt a risk-based cybersecurity approach, aligning smoothly the platform with emerging requirements such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
Stronger foundations, better performance, and a platform ready for the future.
