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Updated: Aug 30, 2025

Rapid and Efficient Spatiotemporal Monitoring of Normal and Aberrant Cytosine Methylation within Intact Zebrafish Embryos
Published on: August 18, 2022
Methylome data derived from maternal-zygotic DNA methyltransferase 3aa zebrafish
Masaki Shirai1, Kazuya Takayama1, Haruko Takahashi1,2
1Department of Biological Science, Graduate School of Science, Hiroshima University, Kagamiyama 1-3-1, Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima, 739-8526 Japan.
Abstract:
Genomic DNA methylation is an epigenetic marker mediated by DNA methyltransferases (Dnmts); in vertebrates, it comprises of a maintenance DNA methyltransferase, Dnmt1, and two de novo DNA methyltransferases (Dnmt3a and Dnmt3b). In zebrafish, there are two homologs of the mammalian Dnmt3a: Dnmt3aa and Dnmt3ab. A knockout (KO) mutant of zebrafish dnmt3aa was generated using the CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing system as a new model for DNA methylation research. Since zebrafish dnmt3aa KO mutants were viable and fertile, a maternal-zygotic dnmt3aa deficient mutant (MZdnmt3aa) was generated. We performed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) to reveal the DNA methylation profile using this mutant and identified genomic regions with altered CpG methylation as differentially methylated regions (DMRs) in this mutant compared to those in the wild-type fish. We provided novel raw and processed datasets using the MZdnmt3aa KO mutant, and the raw data of WGBS are available through the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), accession number GSE178690.

