Establishment of a Transgenic Zebrafish Expressing GFP in the Skeletal Muscle as an Ornamental Fish

Transgenic animals have a critical role in the advancement of our knowledge in different fields of life sciences. Along with recent advances in genome engineering technologies, a wide spectrum of techniques have been applied to produce transgenic animals. Tol2 transposase method is one of the most popular approaches that were used to generate transgenic animals. The current study was set out to produce an ornamental fish, which express enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) under control of mylpfa promoter by using Tol2 transposase method.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) cloning method was performed to insert zebrafish myosin promoter (mylpfa) into Tol2-EGFP plasmid at the upstream of EGFP. In vitro transcription method was used to prepare the transposase mRNA. The Tol2-EGFP plasmid and transposase mRNA were then co-injected into the one-cell stage of zebrafish zygotes. After two days, the fluorescent microscopic analysis was used to select transgenic zebrafishes.

Our data showed that the optimum concentration for recombinant Tol2 vector and transposase mRNA were 50 ng/ul and 100 ng/ul, respectively. The results also revealed that the quality of embryos and quantity of injected construct had the important effects on Tol2 transposase method efficiency.

Data showed that Tol2 transposase is an appropriate method to generate zebrafish transgene. Our finding also showed that mylpfa promoter is a strong promoter that can be used as a selected promoter in the ornamental fish industry.