iSpawn - Zebrafish breeding at Children's Hospital Boston
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Developed by Christian Lawrence and Isaac Adatto of Boston Children's Hospital Aquatic Resources Program and the laboratory of Leonard Zon, the iSpawn is a specialized breeding tank designed to take advantage of the zebrafish's natural preference for breeding in shallow water.
The system holds much promise for genetic and stem cell researchers who use zebrafish. In a paper in PLoS ONE, Adatto, Lawrence, and Zon, director of Boston Children's Stem Cell Research Program and a leading authority on zebrafish as a research model, directly compared the iSpawn's performance with that of the standard breeding practice, looking at parameters like the time needed to conduct a large-scale collection and the numbers of embryos collected. The iSpawn won hands down, allowing the team to collect double the number of fish embryos (8,400 versus 4,200) in a quarter of the time and less than one-fifth the amount of lab space.