For Immediate Release
A Free Electronic Management Repository for Zebrafish
Contact: Kathryn Ryan
914-740-2250
kryan@liebertpub.com
New Rochelle, NY, October 1, 2018—Effective and efficient electronic systems for managing zebrafish colony operations are available but expensive. Researchers now offer an open-source electronic husbandry repository based on free Google applications that is cloud-based and can be managed using an everyday smartphone, making it accessible to all lab members. This new electronic system is described in Zebrafish, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Zebrafish website through November 1, 2018.
In the article entitled “An Open-Source Husbandry Repository,” Christopher Mark LaCoursiere, Jeremy Ullmann, and Annapurna Poduri, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA report on the increasing complexity of thousands of zebrafish colonies resulting from the maturation of the field and growing numbers of transgenic model organisms and reporter lines. All of these fish require careful tracking and effective organization methods. Through the use of applications such as Google Sheets and Google Forms, the repository can capture demographic metadata for differentiating strains, such as tank name, tank number, location, and parents. It can also help track fish mortality and fertilization, for example.
“The move to improve reproducibility in science is going to require some new tools for data capture and organization. This paper provides an innovative option for our zebrafish husbandry work that is accessible to any laboratory,” says Stephen Ekker, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Zebrafish and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number Ro1NS100766-01. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
About the Journal
Zebrafish is an authoritative peer-reviewed journal published bimonthly in print and online. Led by Stephen Ekker, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, Zebrafish is the only peer-reviewed journal to focus on the zebrafish and other aquarium fish species as models for the study of vertebrate development, evolution, toxicology, and human disease. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Zebrafish website.
About the Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including DNA and Cell Biology, Stem Cells and Development, and Cellular Reprogramming. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry’s most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm’s 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.