The C57BL/6 and C57BL/10 sublines of the C57BL mouse line diverged sometime prior to 1937. The C57BL/10 subline was passed from Clarence Little to J.P. Scott (lab code Sc) at F26 and from Scott to George Snell (Sn) at F35 around 1947. In 1953, Snell sent mice of this line, C57BL/10ScSn (also known as C57BL/10Sn) to the National Institutes of Health (N) (Vogel et al. 1979), where it was initially designated C57BL/10ScSnN; however, Snell's lab code was dropped early on, and the strain has been called C57BL/10ScN for most of its history at NIH (Hansen et al. 2000). Clarence Reeder (Cr) began maintaining mice of this line at the Frederick Cancer Research Center, Frederick, MD in 1961 (Vogel et al. 1979), and mice distributed from this colony were designated C57BL/10ScNCr (Hansen et al. 2000). The breeding stock at the Cancer Research Center is replenished regularly with C57BL/10ScN from NIHAGR (Hansen et al. 2000), and mice of both colonies are screened annually for 14 biochemical markers and every two years by skin grafting; therefore, C57BL/10ScN, C57BL/10ScNCr and, presumably, C57BL/10ScCr are names for the same subline of C57BL/10.
A pedigreed sibling pair of C57BL/10ScN mice obtained in August, 2000 at N130 from the NIH foundation colony was used to found the colony now maintained at The Jackson Laboratory.
