Development of the pancreas in medaka

In the present work, pancreatic organogenesis has been studied in the medaka (Oryzias latipes), a teleost fish with several advantages as an experimental system in developmental biology. We demonstrated that the pancreas develops from three primordia budding from the dorsal and ventral faces of the gut epithelium. Such buds then fuse to form a single endocrine islet surrounded by exocrine tissue. Interestingly, the endocrine tissue forms only from the dorsal bud. We next analyzed a collection of medakas that had been hybridized with cDNAs derived from an anterior brain library. We found new clones expressed in the pancreatic region demonstrating that the medaka can be used to define new genes expressed in the pancreatic region that follow a specific spatial and temporal pattern of expression.