High-efficiency gene transfer into adult fish: A new tool to study fin regeneration

Zebrafish represents an excellent model to study the function of vertebrate genes (e.g., well-developed genetics, large number of mutants, and genomic sequencing in progress), inasmuch as we have tools to manipulate gene expression. Recent use of injected morpholinos in eggs provides a good method to '' knockdown 11 gene expression in early development, (Nasevicius and Ekker, 2000), and the ''caged'' RNA injected in eggs allows to overexpress a gene in a specific set of cells (Ando et aL, 2001). However, a method to specifically modify gene expression in the juvenile or in the adult is still missing. Such a method would be a very powerful tool to understand gene function in differentiated tissues. We describe here an electroporation-based approach, which allows gene transfer in adult tissues. Its efficiency was assessed using a GFP (green fluorescent protein) dependent assay. We then used this method to disrupt the Fgf signalling pathway during the process of regeneration. (C) 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.