The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, non-profit biomedical research institution. It employs more than 3,000 employees in Bar Harbor, Maine; Sacramento, California; Farmington, Connecticut; Shanghai, China; and Yokohama, Japan. The institution is a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center and has NIH Centers of Excellence in aging and systems genetics. The laboratory is also the world's source for more than 8,000 strains of genetically defined mice, home of the Mouse Genome Informatics database, and is an international hub for scientific courses, conferences, training and education.