Large-scale zebrafish embryonic heart dissection for transcriptional analysis.

ABSTRACT: The zebrafish embryonic heart is composed of only a few hundred cells, representing only a small fraction of the entire embryo. Therefore, to prevent the cardiac transcriptome from being masked by the global embryonic transcriptome, it is necessary to collect sufficient numbers of hearts for further analyses. Furthermore, as zebrafish cardiac development proceeds rapidly, heart collection and RNA extraction methods need to be quick in order to ensure homogeneity of the samples. Here, we present a rapid manual dissection protocol for collecting functional/beating hearts from zebrafish embryos. This is an essential prerequisite for subsequent cardiac-specific RNA extraction to determine cardiac-specific gene expression levels by transcriptome analyses, such as quantitative real-time polymera

SUBMITTER: Lombardo VA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4354524 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature