Breeding transgenic zebrafish for studies of retina

National Institute Of Neurological Disorders And Stroke

Investigators

Abstract

In vertebrate animals, retinal neural circuits process images, extracting information about color, shape size and movement from visual surroundings. While laboratory animals such as cat, rat, mouse and rabbit provide plausible models of human nocturnal vision, zebrafish, like humans and other old-world primates, are remarkable for diurnal color vision. Zebrafish is a tetrachromat with four cone photoreceptor morphologies, and eight cone opsin types selectively sensitive to red, green, blue and ultraviolet wavelengths. Studies of the neural circuitry through which this rich color information is processed can be aided through studies of genetically modified fish lines. The zebrafish lines generated and maintained under this protocol were imported from other laboratories, where extra genes were added to, or deleted from, the wild type genome. In some cases new phenotypes are created from these imported lines in house by cross breeding. Genetic makeup may be confirmed through sequencing on existing lines. Adult and larval fish produced in this research program are studied according to goals and objectives described in an accompanying research programs. The studies of image processing in normal retinal circuits provides a background on which to understand disease processes in neural circuits. This animal facility houses genetic mutations of vision which are analogues of human genetic disease. One of these, a Mir183 mutation, is an analogue of a mutation causing human retinal degeneration. These zebrafish mutants were sequenced prior to electrophysiological studies.