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Updated: May 6, 2026
Zebrafish In Situ Spinal Cord Preparation for Electrophysiological Recordings from Spinal Sensory and Motor Neurons
Published on: April 18, 2017
Automated prior knowledge-based quantification of neuronal patterns in the spinal cord of zebrafish
Johannes Stegmaier1, Maryam Shahid, Masanari Takamiya
1Institute for Applied Computer Science (IAI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, Institute for Toxicology and Genetics (ITG), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany and Faculty of Biosciences, Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
Motivation:
To reliably assess the effects of unknown chemicals on the development of fluorescently labeled sensory-, moto- and interneuron populations in the spinal cord of zebrafish, automated data analysis is essential.
Results:
For the evaluation of a high-throughput screen of a large chemical library, we developed a new method for the automated extraction of quantitative information from green fluorescent protein (eGFP) and red fluorescent protein (RFP) labeled spinal cord neurons in double-transgenic zebrafish embryos. The methodology comprises region of interest detection, intensity profiling with reference comparison and neuron distribution histograms. All methods were validated on a manually evaluated pilot study using a Notch inhibitor dose-response experiment. The automated evaluation showed superior performance to manual investigation regarding time consumption, information detail and reproducibility.
Availability And Implementation:
Being part of GNU General Public Licence (GNU-GPL) licensed open-source MATLAB toolbox Gait-CAD, an implementation of the presented methods is publicly available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/zebrafishimage/.
