Lipid‐based transfection as a method for gene delivery in zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryos

A major challenge to the widespread production of transgenic, knockout and knockdown zebrafish has been the absence of a simple and effective procedure for introducing macromolecules into the fertilized egg. None of the existing techniques for gene transfer in fish embryos has proven to be a major advance over cytoplasm microinjection, which is a technically demanding and time‐consuming procedure. This report addresses this need, considering that the development of protocols for lipid‐based transfection with fish embryos would considerably simplify gene transfer in this complex biological model. In this study, lipid‐based transfection with two different reporter vectors was carried out in zebrafish embryos at different developmental stages. The parameters tested included different plasmid/transfection reagent ratios as well as the influence of an added transfection enhancer reagent. When embryos were transfected in the blastula stage with a pEGFP‐N1 vector, more than 35% successfully incorporated the plasmid and expressed the fluorescent protein 24 h after transfection. The transfection enhancer did not show any significant effect in our experiments. This work presents an approach to implement this technique as a faster, cheaper and more practical alternative than microinjection.