A living window on stem cell development.

Now you can watch under a light microscope the full cycle of organ development, in a live vertebrate with all the same genes humans have. For the first time you can follow the progress of a single stem cell, or watch a cancer develop in vivo.

We recently created Casper, an extremely transparent zebrafish mutant. You can transplant progenitors from a donor population and then watch everything that goes on inside. You can see where stem cells travel and how they behave once they enter a tissue.

Also, because zebrafish produce so many embryos, you can screen large chemical libraries very quickly. Simply watch what happens when embryos absorb factors added to the water. In a recent screen, we found a chemical that amplifies blood stem cells.

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- Leonard Zon, M.D.
Chairman of Stemgent Scientific Advisory Board

For more information, see "Transparent adult zebrafish as a tool for in vivo transplantation analysis," White et al., Cell Stem Cell 2(2),183-189, February, 2008