Use of PCR template-derived probes prevents off-target whole mount in situ hybridization in transgenic zebrafish
- Authors
- Cha, Y.R., and Weinstein, B.M.
- ID
- ZDB-PUB-120702-35
- Date
- 2012
- Source
- Zebrafish 9(2): 85-89 (Journal)
- Registered Authors
- Cha, Young, Weinstein, Brant M.
- Keywords
- none
- MeSH Terms
-
- Animals
- DNA Probes*
- Embryo, Nonmammalian
- In Situ Hybridization/methods
- In Situ Hybridization/veterinary*
- Polymerase Chain Reaction
- Zebrafish/genetics*
- PubMed
- 22715949 Full text @ Zebrafish
Transgenic zebrafish have been utilized for in vivo analysis of cell behaviors using advanced imaging techniques, for analyzing spatiotemporal gene regulation, and for targeted mis-expression of transgenes. The Tg(fli1a:EGFP)y1 vascular reporter has been particularly useful for examining the development of blood and lymphatic vessels, but it has been suggested that whole-mount in situ hybridization may result high background staining in this line, potentially limiting its usefulness. Here, we show that off-target hybridization of plasmid vector-derived probes to tissues expressing transgenes occurs in a number of different commonly used transgenic lines as a result of multiple cloning site sequences present in the cloning vectors, suggesting this may be a more general problem. However, we also show that this problem is easily avoided by performing in situ hybridization using probes synthesized from PCR templates lacking vector sequences.