High-throughput imaging of adult fluorescent zebrafish with an LED fluorescence macroscope.

Zebrafish are a useful vertebrate model for the study of development, behavior, disease and cancer. A major advantage of zebrafish is that large numbers of animals can be economically used for experimentation; however, high-throughput methods for imaging live adult zebrafish had not been developed. Here, we describe protocols for building a light-emitting diode (LED) fluorescence macroscope and for using it to simultaneously image up to 30 adult animals that transgenically express a fluorescent protein, are transplanted with fluorescently labeled tumor cells or are tagged with fluorescent elastomers.

High-throughput cell transplantation establishes that tumor-initiating cells are abundant in zebrafish T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Self-renewal is a feature of cancer and can be assessed by cell transplantation into immune-compromised or immune-matched animals. However, studies in zebrafish have been severely limited by lack of these reagents. Here, Myc-induced T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemias (T-ALLs) have been made in syngeneic, clonal zebrafish and can be transplanted into sibling animals without the need for immune suppression.