The murine tail-tip bleeding model is widely used to measure bleeding time, blood loss, and survival after treatment [1][2][3][4]. Because of the considerable variation in data from these studies and thus the need for large sample sizes per group, and the lack of comparability of results from different laboratories, research groups have tried to standardize the model. In 2010, the SSC of the ISTH proposed standardized methods for determining tail bleeding time in mice. The SSC report standardized the tail clipping by endorsing the use of a warming chamber to evenly warm the anesthetized mouse, and assessing the influence of anesthesia and systolic blood pressure on blood loss [5].We sought to test the ability of the standardized method to detect differences in bleeding phenotypes of wild-type mouse strains, which may show different bleeding phenotypes [6]. The relevance of the genetic background of inbred mouse strains or transgenic mice on phenotype has been described in various research fields. Mice may differ in physiologic parameters [7] or in response to triggers. Polymorphisms exist for substrains of the same inbred strains [8]. Genetic background also influences pathways that regulate thrombosis and hemostasis: differences were observed in global bleeding and thrombosis assays [9], coagulation and fibrinolytic factors [10], and susceptibility to treatment [11].To investigate the ability of the tail-tip bleeding assay to detect the influence of genetic background on bleeding phenotype, we used hemophilic mice on different backgrounds, i.e. coagulation factor VIII (exon 17) knockout (FVIII À/À ) [12] mice on a BALB/c, C57BL/6, or mixed background, along with different substrains of wild-type C57BL/6 or BALB/c mice ( Table 1). The mice were anesthetized with 100 mg kg -1 ketamine and 10 mg kg -1 xylazine and placed in a warming chamber. Two millimeters of the tail tip were clipped with a guillotine [4], the tails were immersed in warm saline (2 mL, 35 AE 2°C), and blood was collected over a period of 60 min; anesthesia was maintained as required by subcutaneous supplementation with one-third of the starting dose. Blood loss was determined gravimetrically. At the end of this observation period, the mice were removed from the chamber and humanely killed by cervical dislocation. Pairwise tests of equality of variance were performed with a bootstrap approach; the level of statistical significance was set to P = 0.05.C.FVIII À/À mice showed markedly lower median blood loss (365.7 mg) than B6.FVIII À/À (965.2 mg) and B6; FVIII À/À (890.4 mg) mice. For all three strains, median blood loss was lower in females than in males, with the largest sex difference (634 mg vs. 954 mg for females vs. males) and the highest interindividual variation being observed in B6;FVIII À/À mice (Fig. 1). In 129S1/SvmJ mice and the four substrains of BALB/c mice, median blood loss (23.5 mg and 10.0-19.0 mg, respectively) and interanimal variability were low. In contrast, median blood loss in C57BL/6 substrains varied from 36.0 mg (C57BL/...