I spent all of yesterday reading the zebrafish manual and learning (or trying to learn) how to care for them, their embryology, and necessary staining techniques. Oh, and digging up long-forgotten genetics and molecular biology topics. I'm going to be helping out a second year grad student on mapping a gene called mi40. When mutated, it screws up the placement of UV photoreceptors in the zebrafish retina.
At least I think all the above information is correct... searching "mi40 UV photoreceptor mutation in zebrafish" on PubMed yields a listing of papers on UV photoreceptor development, but nothing on the mi40 gene, even though there is a poster about it outside the lab.
Other than that, today I got to prep the fish for map crosses; in other words, I separated the fish according to sex and put each fish in their own tank. Then we feed them for a week, or until they get big enough for us to determine their sex with certainty. Apparently males are supposed to have slimmer yellow bellies, while females are more silver and look pregnant all the time. The problem here is that males that eat a lot of food also look pregnant.
So I still feel completely lost as to what I'm doing; there's so much stuff to learn in too short of a time period...
