Rainbow Fish

One of the greatest mysteries in biology is how living things grow from a single fertilised egg cell into a complex organism. And the biggest challenge facing researchers trying to answer this question is how to spy on individual cells as they grow, multiply and specialise. Help is at hand from a clever genetic engineering system called Brainbow. It makes individual cells in a developing organism switch on unique combinations of red, blue and green fluorescent molecules, 'painting' each one a distinct colour. Scientists have now adapted this system to work in zebrafish, naming it Zebrabow. This striking picture shows the fin on the side of an adult Zebrabow fish – the clusters of cells that are all the same colour grew from the same cell in the embryo. The technique could prove powerful for enabling scientists to track the origins of different tissues, revealing how they form and grow.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image courtesy of Y. Albert Pan and colleagues
• Harvard University
• Reproduced with permission from Development
• Research published in Development, July 2013