A Simple Blood Vessel Imaging Protocol for Live Zebrafish Larva

Zebrafish larva is a simple model system to study blood vessel development because of its excellent optical properties. Current methods to study blood vessels in zebrafish involve utilizing either blood vessel-specific transgenic lines or specialized techniques such as microangiography and video capillaroscopy. In this study, we have developed a simple protocol using ImageJ to observe the blood vessels of live zebrafish larva at different developmental stages, namely 1- to 4-day postfertilization (dpf). To validate this protocol, we treated 1 dpf zebrafish embryos with 100 μM quercetin, and analyzed the impaired development of subintestinal vein in the quercetin-treated 3 dpf larvae.