Use of zebrafish for cardiovascular research is expanding towards research on adult hearts. For these applications, quick and simple isolation of cardiac tissues is key to avoid post-mortem changes and to obtain an adequate number of samples. Here, we describe a fast and reproducible method for dissecting adult zebrafish hearts.
El uso del sistema de modelo de pez cebra para estudiar el desarrollo, la regeneración, y la enfermedad se está expandiendo hacia el uso de los corazones adultos para disociación celular y purificación de ARN, ADN y proteínas. Todas estas aplicaciones exigen la rápida recuperación de un número significativo de los corazones de pez cebra para evitar gen regulador, metabólicos y otros cambios que comienzan después de la muerte. También se requieren adultos corazones de pez cebra para el estudio de la estructura del corazón para una variedad de mutantes y para el estudio de la regeneración del corazón. Sin embargo, la disección corazón del pez cebra tradicional es lenta y difícil y requiere herramientas especializadas, haciendo la disección a gran escala de corazones de pez cebra adultos tedioso. Los métodos tradicionales también albergan el riesgo de dañar el corazón durante la disección. Aquí se describe un método para la disección de corazones adultos de pez cebra que es rápido, reproducible, y preserva la arquitectura del corazón. Además, este método no requiere herramientas especializadas, es indoloro para el pez cebra,se pueden realizar en muestras frescas o fijos, y se puede realizar en el pez cebra de tan sólo un mes de edad. El enfoque descrito se expande el uso de adultos de pez cebra para la investigación cardiovascular.
Zebrafish are an excellent model for studying heart development and human disease1,2. Specific advantages include the translucent nature of zebrafish embryos, the availability of many genetic mutants and transgenic reporter lines, and the availability of genome editing technologies. In addition to their advantages for studying early heart development, zebrafish are an ideal system for studying vertebrate heart regeneration3.
More recently, adult zebrafish are playing an important part in bioinformatics approaches to studying cardiovascular development and disease, due to their relatively large clutch size and relatively quick and inexpensive breeding compared to other vertebrate models. Promising techniques include ribosome profiling, RNA-Seq, and cell dissociation and FACS sorting4-7. However, for these techniques the quality of the data can depend on obtaining a large number of samples in a rapid, efficient, and reproducible manner, before gene regulatory, metabolic, transcriptional, and other changes occur.
Dissection of adult zebrafish organs has been described in the past8,9. However, previous approaches to dissection of the heart were slow, ran the risk of damaging the heart during dissection, required special tools, and/or required fixation of the zebrafish prior to dissection; for these reasons, past approaches to zebrafish adult heart dissection were not optimized for high-throughput applications and/or applications requiring fresh tissue.
Here, we describe a method for adult zebrafish heart dissection that is simple, fast, efficient, and reproducible, while preserving cardiac morphology. This method does not include cutting into the pericardial space and therefore does not risk damaging the heart during dissection. Instead, this method relies on anatomical landmarks of the zebrafish, and therefore, it is highly reproducible. This dissection method is also versatile in that it can be used on fresh or fixed fish, and on zebrafish as young as one month old. Finally, this method results in minimal suffering to the zebrafish because after anesthesia and/or rapid cooling, the fish is additionally decapitated and pithed in the course of the dissection procedure.
Aunque se han descrito métodos para la disección de la corazón del pez cebra adultos, estos métodos eran mucho tiempo y comúnmente causaron daños al corazón durante la disección. Para llevar a cabo experimentos en los que puede ser necesario un gran número de corazones adultos, y / o al evitar la degradación del tejido del corazón es importante para aplicaciones posteriores, el tiempo requerido usando técnicas de disección tradicionales es prohibitivo. Del mismo modo, la obtención reproducible en buen esta…
The authors have nothing to disclose.
The authors would like to thank Dr. Shaun Coughlin for hosting the filming of this procedure in his laboratory, and for general support. R.A. was supported by the NIH (F32HL110489) and the Sarnoff Cardiovascular Research Foundation. S.R. was supported by a Research Fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the American Heart Association (AHA). D.Y.R.S was supported by the NIH (RO1HL54737), the Packard Foundation, and the Max Planck Society.
small tank for transporting fish | Aquaneering | ZHCT100 | |
fish net | Petsmart | 36-16731 | |
250mL glass beaker | Kimble | 14005-250 | |
9cm polystyrene petri dish | Nunc | 172958 | |
razor blade | Personna American Safety Razor Company | 94-120-71 | |
two Dumont #5SF forceps | Fine Science Tools | 11252-00 | |
dissecting microscope | Olympus | SZX16 | |
Tricaine | Sigma | A-5040 | |
plastic transfer pipette | Thermo Scientific | 202-20S | |
gooseneck light source | Dolan-Jenner Industries, Inc | Fiber-Lite 180 Illuminator, 181 Dual Gooseneck System | |
fluorescent light source | Lumen Dynamics | X-Cite 120Q | optional |
micro-scissors | Biomedical Research Instruments, Inc | 11-1000 | optional |
RBC Lysis Buffer | eBioscience | 00-4333-57 | optional |