Sutdent Report: Zebrafish Again? What Did You Expect?

Wow, it's been a little while since I last blogged. I've been busy trying to stain the eyes of my zebra fish, but still with little luck. My goal is to dye the retinas and their resulting optic nerves and neural pathways of developing zebrafish. After staining the retinas and optic nerve, I was going to keep a group under constant intense lighting conditions, another group under a regular 12 hour dark and 12 hour light cycle, while raising yet another group in complete darkness for 6 days after fertilization. I would then test their visual processing skills by rotating a stimulus around their tank and seeing whether or not members of each group followed the stimulus. However, I haven't been able to do even one run through as I can't get my fish to live long enough or stain them early enough.

I've been using self made micro spotters to inject dye into the retinas of these developing fish, but there are a lot of problems that I'm still running into. One of the largest is that I can't seem to get the retinas stained until the fish are at least 2 or 3 days old (post fertilization). By this time a lot of early development in the retina as well as neural construction of pathways to the optic tectum and lateral geniculate (some of the primary visual sensory areas of the fish brain) have already occurred. To make matters worse, the fish often times don't survive past four or five days after staining. This might be due to poor maintenance (whoops), but they should survive if I simply feed them and change their water every other day. I really think that I might be poking through the retina and damaging other tissues when I stain with my micro spotters. I know there are many fancy pants scientists reading this right now who could do the experiment in their sleep, but I guess I'm still just figuring out what doing science is really all about (which is why I love this class).
~Bright Lights

More like this

This week I've been diving in a little more into doing some actual research myself. Nothing breakthrough mind you, just some simple experiment to sort of understand the world around and inside of me a little better. My partner and I are looking into how the optic nerve develops inside of zebra fish…
There are some great questions coming in to Ask a Scienceblogger! If you (or your kids?) have a question you want answered by a scienceblogger drop by Page 3.14 (the blog of the SB overlordz) and leave your question in the comments on this post. Tyler asked: It's said that the left hemisphere of…
The classic Nobel Prize-winning studies of David Hubel and Torsten Weisel showed how the proper maturation of the developing visual cortex is critically dependent upon visual information received from the eyes. In what would today be considered highly unethical experiments, Hubel and Weisel sewed…
This is the first of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. If you were a designer tasked with creating a machine for collecting and processing light, the last thing you would come up with is the human eye. Darwin marvelled at the eye as an "organ of extreme…

workin the lab.. on a Saturday night? You are twice the student I am.

By CreamyBoris (not verified) on 08 Dec 2007 #permalink

OT, but you spelled 'student' wrong

:P

Keep at it, it will work out eventually!!

By mudderbadger (not verified) on 08 Dec 2007 #permalink

It sounds like you're definitely experiencing real science - the question is interesting, you know that the answer, whatever it is, is going to be interesting, but there's a lot of fidgety, monotonous, frustrating work between the two.

Good luck.