Whole-organism 3D quantitative characterization of zebrafish melanin by silver deposition micro-CT.

ABSTRACT: We previously described X-ray histotomography, a high-resolution, non-destructive form of X-ray microtomography (micro-CT) imaging customized for three-dimensional (3D), digital histology, allowing quantitative, volumetric tissue and organismal phenotyping (Ding et al., 2019). Here, we have combined micro-CT with a novel application of ionic silver staining to characterize melanin distribution in whole zebrafish larvae. The resulting images enabled whole-body, computational analyses of regional melanin content and morphology. Normalized micro-CT reconstructions of silver-stained fish consistently reproduced pigment patterns seen by light microscopy, and further allowed direct quantitative comparisons of melanin content across wild-type and mutant samples, including subtle phenotypes not pr

SUBMITTER: Katz SR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8445617 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature