Zebrafish articles from across Nature Portfolio

Maturation of innate immune cells is a graded stereotypic process which is often conserved across species. Here authors label distinct neutrophil leukocyte developmental stages via generating combinations of transgenic zebrafish reporter strains, followed by transcriptome analysis of different neutrophil maturation stages and comparison to the gene expression profile of developing neutrophils from humans and mice.

Environmental enrichment is a home-based intervention that mimics natural habitats for laboratory-housed animals. This systematic review of 27 environmental enrichment protocols finds consistent benefits for zebrafish welfare while raising the importance of a standardizing protocol to improve reproducibility of results.

A deep learning-based method that uses microscopy images to stage embryos and analyze developmental time.

We present the ‘zebrafish single-cell atlas of perturbed embryos’, single-cell trancriptomic data of developing zebrafish embryos across various timepoints and with genetic perturbations.

Embryogram allows stress measurements during migration of the lateral line primordium in zebrafish embryos.

Optogenetic and thermogenetic tools have been limited to applications for single-state control of cellular processes. A single-component optogenetic tool was found to act as both a temperature sensor and a photoreceptor, enabling multi-state control of developmental signaling.

How lymphatic vessels arise from veins is still poorly understood. A study reports the discovery of a ribosome biogenesis regulator Ddx21 as a previously unappreciated specific factor that is important for the first steps of lymphatic but not blood vessel development. The finding may lead to better strategies to selectively target lymphangiogenesis.

A new CRISPR/Cas9 method that can generate F0 mutant zebrafish has the potential to cut costs, spare time, and reduce animal use for researchers interested in screening loss-of-function alleles in vivo.

To achieve knockdown rather than knockout of particular genes, a new paper demonstrates a CRISPR/Cas13 method that can efficiently edit mRNA in zebrafish, medaka, killifish, and mouse embryos.