Improving cloning in Zebrafish
Zebrafish happens to be a successful vertebrate animal model for the study of embryonic development, physiology, aging and disease.Recently ,research with zebra fish has extended to model human diseases and to analyze the formation and functions of cell populations within organs.
The popularity of Zebrafish as a vertebrate model is only next to Mouse, for performing genetic studies. Zebrafish is extensively used as a model in cancer research and cardiovascular research because they have many of the same genes we have.
Cibelli and colleagues at Michigan University has developed a new, more efficient way of cloning zebra fish, a breakthrough that could have implications for human health research.Previous methods of cloning zebra fish have had very low success rates. But using this new method, the number of cloned fish that can be obtained from an adult fin cell or an embryonic tail clip increased by 2 percent to 13 percent respectively. Authors made technical modifications to existing methods for somatic cell nuclear transfer in the zebrafish.
The normal cloning technique uses an unfertilized egg and a donor cell. The DNA is removed from the egg and replaced by the DNA taken from the donor. The egg cell is then coaxed into dividing. The resulting fish is an exact genetic copy of the donor.
Using Cibelli and colleagues’ technique, the egg is gently removed from the female zebra fish and placed in a solution of ovarian fluid from a Chinook salmon.This one proved valuable for the authors as it kept the egg inactive for some time. It gave them two or three hours to work with.
Later by borrowing a technique from human in vitro fertilization, the DNA was removed from the egg by using a laser.Next, Cibelli’s team devised a novel, more efficient way of transplanting the donor cells into the egg,which was the trickiest part according to them.They used the same entrance that sperm uses,but the problem was to find the only spot available on the egg.
One of the main advantage of using zebra fish research is their eggs are transparent and the fish’s development is easy to follow.Improving of cloning techniques in Zebrafish is vital because currently only the mouse remains the best model for gene targeting.
Reference:
Somatic cell nuclear transfer in zebrafish
Kannika Siripattarapravat, Boonya Pinmee,Patrick J Venta, Chia-Cheng Chang & Jose B Cibelli
doi:10.1038/nmeth.1369 Nature Methods
Related Posts:
If you liked what you just read, you may want to subscribe to my
RSS FEED
Thanks for visiting!
Leave your response!