Abstract
Zebrafish breed year round and females are capable of producing thousands of eggs during their lifetime. This amazing fecundity is due to the fact that the adult ovary, contains premeiotic oocyte progenitor cells, called oogonia, which produce a continuous supply of new oocytes throughout adult life. Oocyte progenitor cells can be easily identified based on their expression of Vasa, and their characteristic nuclear morphology. Thus, the zebrafish ovary provides a unique and powerful system to study the genetic regulation of oocyte production in a vertebrate animal. A method is presented here for identifying oocyte progenitor cells in the zebrafish ovary using whole-mount confocal immunofluorescence that is simple and accurate.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Holger Knaut for the anti-Vasa antibodies. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant IOS-0920637.
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Draper, B.W. (2012). Identification of Oocyte Progenitor Cells in the Zebrafish Ovary. In: Mace, K., Braun, K. (eds) Progenitor Cells. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 916. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-980-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-980-8_12
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