A MICROFABRICATED DEVICE FOR QUANTIFYING FORCE IN DEVELOPING ZEBRAFISH EMBRYOS

Abstract

Zebrafish have been widely used in biomedical research as a model for human developmental biology and pathology. The metric of force, produced by the zebrafish itself during development, is of particular interest as previous work has shown mechanical force to drive morphogenesis, homeostasis, and cell-level processes such as differentiation. While progress has been made in developing methods of measuring force in vitro, existing studies highlight the remaining challenges to adopting these methods in vivo. This is due to the complexity of designing a biocompatible, mechanically-tunable micrometer-scale device combined with high-resolution imaging techniques along with a computational pipeline used to precisely extract metrics and compute force. The goal of this research is to develop an implantable fluorescent device to measure force exerted by developing zebrafish embryos during the gastrula stage, a crucial developmental stage during which the overall vertebrate shape and body axis of the zebrafish is formed. The quantification of force can be correlated with morphological changes observed via confocal microscopy to establish a baseline profile of force exerted by the zebrafish at different times during the gastrula stage.