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Updated: Apr 8, 2026
Imaging Cleared Embryonic and Postnatal Hearts at Single-cell Resolution
Published on: October 7, 2016
Dynamic structure and protein expression of the live embryonic heart captured by 2-photon light sheet microscopy and
Vikas Trivedi1, Thai V Truong2, Le A Trinh3
1Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA ; Translational Imaging Center, University of Southern California, Molecular and Computational Biology, Los Angeles CA 90089, USA ; Equal contribution.
Abstract:
We present an imaging and image reconstruction pipeline that captures the dynamic three-dimensional beating motion of the live embryonic zebrafish heart at subcellular resolution. Live, intact zebrafish embryos were imaged using 2-photon light sheet microscopy, which offers deep and fast imaging at 70 frames per second, and the individual optical sections were assembled into a full 4D reconstruction of the beating heart using an optimized retrospective image registration algorithm. This imaging and reconstruction platform permitted us to visualize protein expression patterns at endogenous concentrations in zebrafish gene trap lines.
