Zebrafish is an ideal model system to study vertebrate development, organogenesis, neurbiology and behavior.
Zebrafish female ~2cm (1in)
In addition to being transparent, zebrafish embryos develop very rapidly. In just 17 hours this zebrafish embryo develops from a single cell to a multicellular embryo with differentiated tissues and organs.
R
B
SC
M
H
Each couple lays about 200 eggs that undergo external fertilization. This allows embryonic manipulations and direct visualization of development given that the embryos are transparent.
In this 30 hours old zebrafish embryo you can observe developing organs like the retina (R), the brain (B), spinal chord (SC), the muscle (M) and the heart (H). Transgenesis is a routine technique, on the left there is a GFP-transgenic expressed under the alpha-actin promoter in muscle cells.
Developed by Antonio Giraldez ®