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 …

Firefox is great browser used by many and what makes it even more useful is the fact that it comes with an option of some very handy Add-ons. Some days back, Nick Oswald, editor-in-chief of the Bitesize Bio blog posted a blog entry on new Firefox Add-ons for scientists and that was a follow up to his famous post from 2007. He describes some very useful Add-ons for the research scientists and I would encourage to read his blog posts for all possible add-ons from Firefox. Today i just describe …

Generation of transgenic Drosophila is possible by microinjection plasmid DNA containing the gene of interest into pole cells (located at one end of embryo) of pre blastoderm embryo. During this particular stage of embryogenesis nuclei are not surrounded by membrane (syncytium stage) and this makes many nuclei accessible for uptake of injected plasmid.
Drosophila transgenesis mainly relies on P-element which was for the first time used by Gerry Rubin and Alan Spradling in 1982.The use of p element for transformation was a major breakthrough in the germline transgenesis in Drosophila. However …

Guanjun Gao, Natalia Wesolowska, and Yikang S. Rong from the laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, have come out with a novel technique to knock out gene of interest in Drosophila. Its called SIRT , which combines various existing methods like homologous Recombination, Site-Specific Integration, and Bacterial Recombineering for targeted mutagenesis.
In SIRT, homologous recombination is used to place a landing site for the phage phiC31 integrase in the vicinity of the target locus. All subsequent genetic modifications to the same gene …

Hugo bellen’s lab generated Drosophila melanogaster bacterial artificial chromosome libraries with 21-kilobase and 83-kilobase inserts in the P[acman] system. P[acman] was developed by Koen Venken in Bellen’s laboratory,which allows scientists to study large chunks of DNA in living flies.Cloning huge fragments of DNA is not possible in classical P-elements and this has been over come in P[acman] that allows modification of cloned fragments by recombineering and germline transformation of genomic DNA fragments up to 133 kilobases.

Vienna Drosophila Research Center (VDRC) recently announced availability of a new large-scale collection of transgenic RNAi lines. These lines have been created using the phiC31 integrase system to target RNAi transgenes to a specific landing site on the second chromosome. This landing site (VIE-260b) was selected from an initial set of 59candidate landing sites, based on its low level of basal expression and consistent high level of GAL4-dependent expression across a range of different tissues. The RNAi transgenes consist of inverted repeats of typically 300-700bpthat were designed to reduce the …

Its no secret that GFP based time lapse live-imaging is a powerful technique for studying different dynamic processes like tissue morphogenesis ,cell death or cell adhesion. The important aspect which needs to be taken care for live cell imaging to minimize detrimental effects such as dehydration and hypoxia. Recently authors Bruce H. Reed, Stephanie C. McMillan, and Roopali Chaudhary reported a novel technique called hanging drop protocol. The main advantage using hanging drop protocol is that it results in excellent viability of embryos during live imaging and does not require …