Cell and Tissue Transplantation in Zebrafish Embryos

Zebrafish (Danio rerio ) embryos have gained considerable popularity in recent years because they offer several advantages for developmental studies. The embryos are easy to manipulate, develop quite rapidly, and many genetic mutations are now becoming available. Classical cell and tissue transplantation techniques have been frequently applied to zebrafish embryos to analyze the state of cell commitment, inductive interaction between embryonic tissues and defective tissues in mutant embryos. This chapter introduces three kinds of transplantation techniques useful for the analysis of early inductive events in zebrafish embryos, such as mesoderm and neural induction.