Injections

Zebrafish develop outside of the mother’s body and are transparent, so that developmental processes can be easily monitored, and manipulation of embryos in a Petri dish is straightforward. We exploit these advantages for injections of constructs at the one-cell stage. For these experiments we use air-pressured micro-injectors (Harvard Instruments) and fine-tipped glass capillaries. Plasmids can be injected for the purpose of generating transgenic animals. RNA and DNA can also be injected for rescue experiments. Dye injections facilitate the identification of donor cells in blastula-transplantation experiments to determine cell-autonomy of gene defects. Finally, morpholino injections can rapidly interrogate gene function.

Apart from these microinjection applications, we also inject hematopoietic or tumor cells into day 2 embryos or into the heart of adult zebrafish in transplantation experiments. Embryos are injected with microinjectors. In adults we use 33g Hamilton syringes.