Researchers have created a transgenic zebrafish with skin that fluoresces in thousands of colours — enabling them to track the behaviour of hundreds of individual cells in real time and to see what happens to skin when it is wounded.
“It’s a spectacular-looking fish,” says Kenneth Poss, who studies tissue regeneration at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and who led the research, published in Developmental Cell1.
The idea is based on the ‘brainbow’ — a technique published in 20072 in which neurons were engineered to express mixtures of fluorescent proteins, producing a random combination of different colours in different cells.
Researchers have created a transgenic zebrafish with skin that fluoresces in thousands of colours — enabling them to track the behaviour of hundreds of individual cells in real time and to see what happens to skin when it is wounded.
More info: http://www.nature.com/news/transgenic-zebrafish-forms-technicolour-skinbow-1.19615
