A highly reproducible, safe cranial window surgery for targeted in vivo manipulations in the adult zebrafish telencephalon

Abstract

Experimental surgery is one of the most fundamental fields of biomedical research, recreating clinical conditions on living organisms similar to clinical patients, to facilitate the design of novel therapies. For modeling neurological and psychiatric disorders, the majority of operative techniques mandatorily include craniotomy for consecutive interactions with the open brain. The most wide-spread methodology involves stereotactic surgery in rodents, implementing a specific head holder, attached to the coordinate table, providing the precise animal head positioning according to the brain structures topology. Despite the high efficiency, such systems require complex instrumental skills and long procedure duration per animal even for simple implantation protocols. Hence, novel alternative model species could be a valuable supplementary tool for such manipulations. Therefore, the zebrafish (Danio rerio) fits perfectly, due to its low cost, easy husbandry, rapid development, optic transparency, and high genetic and physiological similarity to rodents and humans. Furthermore, the everted zebrafish telencephalon provides excellent accessibility to critical mammalian-like structures involved in emotion processing and cognition. However, conventional avian- or rodent-inspired craniotomies in adult zebrafish often trigger inadvertent disruption of the brain vessels network, resulting in high operative mortality. A novel, geometry-driven, non-lethal cranial window protocol preserving neurovascular integrity and ensuring 90-100% post-operative survival is presented to overcome above mentioned limitations. This rapid, simple, and high reproducible technique opens new avenues for precise region-specific in vivo neurosurgery, high-throughput psychopharmacological screening, and neurostimulation in a powerful non-mammalian model species