PUBLICATION

High-Pressure Freezing Electron Microscopy of Zebrafish Oocytes

Authors
Kanagaraj, P., Riedel, D., Dosch, R.
ID
ZDB-PUB-160826-9
Date
2016
Source
Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.)   1457: 167-78 (Chapter)
Registered Authors
Dosch, Roland, Kanagaraj, Palsamy
Keywords
Electron microscopy, High pressure freezing, Oocyte, Zebrafish
MeSH Terms
  • Animals
  • Cryoelectron Microscopy*/methods
  • Female
  • Freezing
  • Microscopy, Electron*/methods
  • Oocytes/ultrastructure*
  • Oogenesis
  • Ovary/cytology
  • Pressure
  • Zebrafish*
PubMed
27557580 Full text @ Meth. Mol. Biol.
Abstract
Oogenesis is an essential cellular and developmental process to prepare the oocyte for propagation of a species after fertilization. Oocytes of oviparous animals are enormous cells endowed with many, big cellular compartments, which are interconnected through active intracellular transport. The dynamic transport pathways and the big organelles of the oocyte provide the opportunity to study cellular trafficking with outstanding resolution. Hence, oocytes were classically used to investigate cellular compartments. Though many novel regulators of vesicle trafficking have been discovered in yeast, tissue culture cells and invertebrates, recent forward genetic screens in invertebrate and vertebrate oocytes isolated novel control proteins specific to multicellular organisms. Zebrafish is a widely used vertebrate model to study cellular and developmental processes in an entire animal. The transparency of zebrafish embryos allows following cellular events during early development with in vivo imaging. Unfortunately, the active endocytosis of the oocyte also represents a drawback for imaging. The massive amounts of yolk globules prevent the penetration of light-beams and currently make in vivo microscopy a challenge. As a consequence, electron microscopy (EM) still provides the highest resolution to analyze the ultra-structural details of compartments and organelles and the mechanisms controlling many cellular pathways of the oocyte. Among different fixation approaches for EM, High Pressure Freezing (HPF) in combination with freeze substitution significantly improves the samples preservation closest to their natural status. Here, we describe the HPF with freeze substitution embedding method for analyzing cellular processes in zebrafish oocytes using electron microscopy.
Genes / Markers
Figures
Expression
Phenotype
Mutations / Transgenics
Human Disease / Model
Sequence Targeting Reagents
Fish
Antibodies
Orthology
Engineered Foreign Genes
Mapping