GIGA Technology platform - Zebrafish facility and transgenics

Advantages of the zebrafish:

• Easy to raise and breed since thousands of them can be housed  in a relatively small facility
• High fertility : an adult female can lay from 200 to 500 eggs every 10 days
• The embryos are transparent during the first 2 days, allowing easy observation of development
• The eggs are fertilized externally , which makes it easy to handle them (injection of transgenes, treatment at accurate embryonic stages by chemical compounds..)
• Fast development : the larvae all have adult features after 72 hours, are autonomous after 4 days and start reproducing  after three months
• Small size allowing development in 96 well plates

This experimental model is thus ideal for both fundamental research (development, transduction pathways,...) and applied research:

• Chemical mutagenesis by morphological screening of mutants
• Screening of new molecules
• Toxicity assays (assessment of cardiac activity, motricity,...)

For all these reasons, this vertebrate model constitutes an alternative approach to the use of mammals such as mice,  rats or rabbits for laboratory assays in accordance with the european regulation #1986/609/CE.

Services

• Zebrafish cDNA
• Gene expression study
• Zebrafish fixed embryos 
• Zebrafish housing, breeding and sanitisation 
• Transgenics
• Gene knock-down by injection of antisense morpholino
• Toxicology assays
• Customer-designed experiments

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Equipment

• Quarantine: 200 tanks (5 000 fish)
•  Main facility:  900 tanks in 3 separate systems (22 000 fish)
•  Lab:    

1. -Transgenesis (6 microinjection stations)
2. -Fluorescence microscopes and stereomicroscopes with camera and image analysis software
3. -Motorised advance Vibroslice Campden MA752
4. -Automated whole mount in situ hybridization station
5. -New: COPAS: flow cytometer for large-sized particles