MS
Model organisms · Imaging
Why larval zebrafish?
They let me image activity across much of a vertebrate brain while controlling sensory feedback and measuring behavior.
Why I use them
Keep mechanism, activity, and behavior in the same experiment.
Larval zebrafish are small and optically accessible, but they still have a vertebrate nervous system and a broad range of measurable behaviors.
In one preparation I can alter a receptor or cell population, observe the resulting activity across the brain, and measure what the animal does next.
Light-sheet imaging
Follow distributed activity at cellular resolution.
Thin optical sections are collected rapidly through the transparent larval brain. I use the resulting volumes to compare activity across cells and regions during behavior and molecular perturbation.
A custom segmentation algorithm identifies individual cells in these datasets. Each colored segment in the videos below represents one cell.
Image volume · Custom cell segmentation
Future extension · Adult fish
Carry optical access into adulthood.
Small, paedomorphic fish may make mature behavior accessible without giving up the optical advantages of larvae. Danionella cerebrum is already an emerging model for imaging the adult brain; Paedocypris progenetica is a more exploratory possibility whose experimental toolkit would need to be developed.
This is a future direction rather than a current experimental program.
© Ralf BritzImage: Ralf Britz / Senckenberg Natural History Collections Dresden, via the Natural History Museum of Bern. Scientific context: Britz, Conway & Rüber (2021).
Source: Titan · University of OsloImage: Titan, University of Oslo. Scientific context: Kottelat et al. (2006).
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