The Cayo Biobank was initially conceived as an initiative of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to promote research on the causes of and potential treatments for mental health disorders, including autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2018, the CBRU expanded its scope to manage tissues that were previously collected on Cayo Santiago during annual trap and release efforts (also funded by NIMH). Currently, the CBRU has DNA and RNA from many tissues and formalin-fixed postmortem tissues from individuals with comprehensive behavioral phenotypes, all of which are available to the research community. Blood and morphometric data are available from close to 1000 animals trapped and released in the decade prior to 2016. Between 2016 and 2021, the CBRU comprehensively sampled tissues from 472 culled macaques. The ages for the culled animals range from 0.1 to 26 years, with the largest number of samples from animals between 3–9 years old.
The Cayo Santiago tissue bank is primarily housed at the University of Pennsylvania, with additional storage facilities at other CBRU laboratories (New York University, Arizona State University, and University of Oxford). More information about the macaques, the available tissue, and tissue characteristics, including age of individual, demographic histories, and postmortem intervals, are maintained in a Cayo Biobank Tissue Catalog (available upon request). The collection will be expanded over the next two years (2022-2023). Additional phenotypic information is available to collaborating partners, and whole-genome sequencing will be carried out on the sampled rhesus macaques. CBRU will make these genomic data publicly available in the Short Read Archive (SRA) of The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).