Officials from the Bar Harbor-based Jackson Laboratory met with a group of Ellsworth city officials and residents earlier this month to lay out the biomedical firm’s plans for its ambitious expansion into the city at a former 140,000-square-foot building that once housed a Lowe’s Home Improvement. The plan includes converting the old box store into a mouse vivarium and the conversion is scheduled to take 18 months. Later this month, Sen. Angus King and Sen. Susan Collins revealed that Jackson Lab received a 5.8M grant from USDA for research support. The majority of this sum is going to support Jackson Laboratory’s Mouse Genome Database. Read about the expansion plans here and about recent grant for research here.