A surgery protocol to construct zebrafish heart damage and regeneration model

Abstract

In recent years, zebrafish has been found to be strikingly capable of heart regeneration at adult stage, which sheds lights on cardiac regenerative medicine, and has also become an important direction for the study of vertebrate genetic and developmental mechanisms. Dissecting the regeneration process and unraveling the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms might help recover the regeneration capacity of the mammalian heart and further provide instructions to potential therapies for certain cardiac diseases such as myocardial infarction. Here, we introduced a simple surgical method to construct heart injury and regeneration model in zebrafish through amputation of ~20% ventricle. The main procedure includes anaesthetization of adult zebrafish, exposure of the heart by dissecting the nearby abdominal skin and opening the pericardium, and amputation of certain fraction of the ventricle at the cardiac apex under a stereo microscope. Over 90% success rate and easy handling with high reproducibility enable this method to be the most commonly used one for the study of zebrafish heart regeneration.