Generation of mouse-zebrafish hematopoietic tissue chimeric embryos for hematopoiesis and host-pathogen interaction studies

Abstract

© 2018. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd. Xenografts of the hematopoietic system are extremely useful as disease models and for translational research. Zebrafish xenografts have been widely used to monitor blood cancer cell dissemination and homing due to the optical clarity of embryos and larvae, which allow unrestricted in vivo visualization of migratory events. Here, we have developed a xenotransplantation technique that transiently generates hundreds of hematopoietic tissue chimeric embryos by transplanting murine bone marrow cells into zebrafish blastulae. In contrast to previous methods, this procedure allows mammalian cell integration into the fish developmental hematopoietic program, which results in chimeric animals containing distinct phenotypes of murine blood cells in both circulation and the hematopoietic niche. Murine cells in chimeric animals express antigens related to (i) hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, (ii) active cell proliferation and (iii) myeloi