Brain-wide cellular resolution imaging of Cre transgenic zebrafish lines for functional circuit-mapping
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, United States
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, United States
Abstract
Decoding the functional connectivity of the nervous system is facilitated by transgenic methods that express a genetically encoded reporter or effector in specific neurons; however, most transgenic lines show broad spatiotemporal and cell-type expression. Increased specificity can be achieved using intersectional genetic methods which restrict reporter expression to cells that co-express multiple drivers, such as Gal4 and Cre. To facilitate intersectional targeting in zebrafish, we have generated more than 50 new Cre lines, and co-registered brain expression images with the Zebrafish Brain Browser, a cellular resolution atlas of 264 transgenic lines. Lines labeling neurons of interest can be identified using a web-browser to perform a 3D spatial search (zbbrowser.com). This resource facilitates the design of intersectional genetic experiments and will advance a wide range of precision circuit-mapping studies.
Data availability
Registered individual confocal brain scans have been deposited in Dryad https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tk467n8
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Brain-wide cellular resolution imaging of Cre transgenic zebrafish lines for functional circuit-mappingDryad Digital Repository, 10.5061/dryad.tk467n8.
Article and author information
Author details
Gregory D Marquart
Funding
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1ZIAHD008884-04)
- Harold A Burgess
Virginia Tech Advanced Research Computing (NA)
- Nicholas F Polys
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#15-039) of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Brain-wide cellular resolution imaging of Cre transgenic zebrafish lines for functional circuit-mapping
eLife 8:e42687.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.42687
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