Light-sheet fluorescence imaging charts the gastrula origin of vascular endothelial cells in early zebrafish embryos

Meijun Pang; Linlu Bai; Weijian Zong; Xu Wang; Ye Bu; Connie Xiong; Jiyuan Zheng; Jieyi Li; Weizheng Gao; Zhiheng Feng; Liangyi Chen; Jue Zhang; Heping Cheng; Xiaojun Zhu; Jing-Wei Xiong

doi:10.1038/s41421-020-00204-7

Light-sheet fluorescence imaging charts the gastrula origin of vascular endothelial cells in early zebrafish embryos

Cell Discov. 2020 Oct 27:6:74. doi: 10.1038/s41421-020-00204-7. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Meijun Pang^#¹, Linlu Bai^#^{1

2}, Weijian Zong¹, Xu Wang¹, Ye Bu¹, Connie Xiong¹, Jiyuan Zheng¹, Jieyi Li¹, Weizheng Gao³, Zhiheng Feng³, Liangyi Chen¹, Jue Zhang³, Heping Cheng¹, Xiaojun Zhu¹, Jing-Wei Xiong^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Key Laboratory of Cardiometabolic Molecular Medicine, Institute of Molecular Medicine and State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
² Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
³ School of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

It remains challenging to construct a complete cell lineage map of the origin of vascular endothelial cells in any vertebrate embryo. Here, we report the application of in toto light-sheet fluorescence imaging of embryos to trace the origin of vascular endothelial cells (ECs) at single-cell resolution in zebrafish. We first adapted a previously reported method to embryo mounting and light-sheet imaging, created an alignment, fusion, and extraction all-in-one software (AFEIO) for processing big data, and performed quantitative analysis of cell lineage relationships using commercially available Imaris software. Our data revealed that vascular ECs originated from broad regions of the gastrula along the dorsal-ventral and anterior-posterior axes, of which the dorsal-anterior cells contributed to cerebral ECs, the dorsal-lateral cells to anterior trunk ECs, and the ventral-lateral cells to posterior trunk and tail ECs. Therefore, this work, to our knowledge, charts the first comprehensive map of the gastrula origin of vascular ECs in zebrafish, and has potential applications for studying the origin of any embryonic organs in zebrafish and other model organisms.

Keywords: Cell biology; Developmental biology.