Peering Inside a Developing Brain

Peering Inside a Developing Brain

Danielle Tomasello

MIT Department of Biology, Whitehead Institute

This is an image of early developing zebrafish brain. We are comparing normal to mutant brains. Mutant brains showed membrane architecture changes. These experiments help us understand what the developing brain should look like and how our mutant brains differ.

For this experiment, I injected a stain into the hindbrain ventricle of developing embryos to look at how lipid rafts in the membrane differ in our mutant line. It is exciting to see neural progenitor cells developing at this stage in the brain and how the membrane architecture is critical for proper neuronal development.

neural progenitor cells in a fish brain

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