Tag Archives: cryopreservation

Cryopreserving and reviving fish embryos

Cryopreservation and the promise of animal revivification is not one of my favourite topics, from a July 13, 2017 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

Scientists report for the first time the ability to both deep freeze and reanimate zebrafish embryos. The method, appearing in the journal ACS Nano (“Gold Nanorod Induced Warming of Embryos from the Cryogenic State Enhances Viability”), could potentially be used to bank larger aquatic and other vertebrate oocytes and embryos, too, for a life in the future.

It seems the science is more advanced than I’d realized. A July 13, 2017 American Chemical Society news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, describes cryopreservation and the technique the scientists used,

Cryopreservation has been used to save sperm, oocytes and even embryos of many species, including humans, cattle and lab animals. Preserving the embryos of most fishes, however, has remained an elusive goal. The embryos are relatively large with big yolks and are divided by multiple compartments. These traits make the embryos difficult to cool and warm uniformly without damage and ice formation. A few techniques, including microinjection of cryoprotectants and laser irradiation for re-warming, have shown promise toward achieving this long-sought goal. John Bischof and colleagues wanted to tweak the methods to see if they could finally make cryopreserving fish a reality.

The researchers injected a cryoprotectant, along with plasmonic gold nanoparticles to serve as a laser absorber, directly into zebrafish embryos. Plunging the embryos in liquid nitrogen rapidly cooled them to a cryogenically stable state in less than a second, according to modeling results. The researchers then used laser irradiation to heat up the nanoparticles, which were uniformly distributed inside the embryos, at an ultra-fast rate (1.4 x 107 degrees Celsius per minute). Not all of the embryos made it, but many were revived –a feat that is currently not possible by other techniques. Their hearts, eyes and nervous systems developed through at least the next 28 hours — and they started to wiggle. As more fish populations shrink and become threatened, the researchers say the cryopreservation method could help establish banks of frozen fish germ cells and embryos that could one day help replenish the oceans’ biodiversity. The technique could also be applied to amphibian, reptile and bird species with similar embryonic sizes and structures.

Here’s a video describing the work,

After watching that a video, I feel that I should revise my opinion of cryopreservation,

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Gold Nanorod Induced Warming of Embryos from the Cryogenic State Enhances Viability by Kanav Khosla, Yiru Wang, Mary Hagedorn, Zhenpeng Qin, and John Bischof. ACS Nano, Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b02216 Publication Date (Web): July 13, 2017

Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.