I have no experience with this, but can you use a larger type of fish? I would think anything you do to remove the skin could have an influence on what you're testing. What exact hypothesis do you have?
It really depends on your skills with a knife. I would recommend using a very flexible scalpel and a dissection scope. We have a girl were I work that removes the otoliths out of fish a very small baitfish not even a week after the larval sac has been used up. Also, can you fix the fish prior to removing the skin either with ethanol, formalin or bouin's solution? If you can fix them I would recommend removing the skin immediately, otherwise the fixative will probably start degrading it in such a small fish. We have a girl were I work that removes the otoliths out a very small baitfish not even a week after the larval sac has been used up. Good luck
@Adam: I want to study the expression of ion transporters in the skin of very early life stage fishes
Have you considered fixation of the whole fish, then sectioning for IHC? Grant, I was unaware that fixatives degraded tissue. I thought they were meant to preserve the tissue.
@Adam: Yeah, I can consider it.. However, I was thinking that anyhow, if I could remove the skin rapidly, I would then store the skin in RNALater solution from which I would isolate the RNA, and then run qRTPCR..
cut open you young fish by ventral and dorsal midline incisions under dissecting scope. pull the epidermis an dermis using forceps and fine scalpel dissociating muscles and viscera. You can isolate RNA from this. you might need one or two rounds of good practice. make sure to rinse the epidermis thoroughly before downstream processes. hope this is useful.
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