Redefining retinoic acid receptor expression in zebrafish embryos using Hybridization Chain Reaction

Retinoic Acid (RA) is the key signaling molecule during embryonic development with the RA pathway playing multiple roles in throughout development. Previous work has shown RA signaling to be key in development of the craniofacial skeleton. RA signaling is driven by RA binding to the nuclear transcription factors, retinoic acid receptor (RAR) and retinoic X receptor (RXR). RARs and RXR heterodimerize to bind specific DNA sequences known as retinoic acid response elements or RAREs. Though the genes that code for these receptors are known to be involved during craniofacial development, in which tissues they are expressed remains uncharacterized, varying temporally and spatially. To address this, we used Hybridization Chain Reaction (HCR) to fluorescently visualize rar and rxr mRNA expression in tissue-specific transgenic zebrafish embryos. Here, we show the overall and tissue-specific expression of each receptor in the pharyngeal endoderm and Cranial Neural Crest Cells (CNCC), two cell types that have been shown to be sensitive to RA perturbations. Here we show that the expression of many of the rar/rxr genes overlap with the endoderm-specific sox17:eGFP and/or the CNCC-specific sox10:eGFP transgenic lines between 12 and 32 h post fertilization; time points that capture CNCC and endoderm migration and morphogenesis.