UC Berkeley researchers have successfully placed imaging probes in zebrafish embryos only several hours after fertilization, which may give stem cell researchers a greater understanding about cell behavior in early development stages.
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working with Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor of chemistry, successfully placed imaging probes on zebrafish glycans, complex-carbohydrate components of cells that aid in cell communication, seven hours after fertilization – allowing scientists to see cell division and embryonic development earlier than they had ever been able to before.
Karen Dehnert, a graduate student in the chemistry department and member of the research team, said researchers reduced the prior time frame of 24 hours, allowing them to see how the glycans behave during earlier stages of cell development and division.
David Schaffer, a professor of chemical engineering and co-director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, said it had been difficult to attach imaging probes at this early stage of development given the small size of embryos.
He said attaching the probes earlier in embryogenesis will help researchers determine how quickly cells differentiate and if there is any cell specialization that occurs during this early stage.
“It could help understand when to harvest embryonic stem cells,” he said.
According to Dehnert, researchers used the zebrafish because it is a transparent vertebrate, which makes the imaging easier to observe.
She said the research team wants to build upon their work by imaging other types of glycans and identifying the proteins the glycans are on.
Laurel Barchas, an integrative biology graduate student who works in another lab at the center, said she incorporated movies of zebrafish embryonic development into her high school outreach talks as part of an education program funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
“Instead of being told about how embryos develop or (being) shown a static diagram, (students) can actually see the cells dividing and sorting to form the primitive spinal cord and brain,” she said in an e-mail.
Posted on the European Molecular Biology Laboratory website, the movies of time-lapsed photos show a mass of bright dots forming into a shape resembling a spinal cord. Bertozzi’s research team used the same imaging techniques to monitor early development.
Barchas said glycan imaging will help scientists and the public understand embryonic development.
“Not only is this new, live, in vivo glycan labeling technique exciting for scientists in learning more about early embryogenesis, but it will also have benefits for students and the general public to more easily visualize and understand early development, thus possibly sparking an interest in stem cell research,” she said in the e-mail.