Generating parabiotic zebrafish embryos for cell migration and homing studies.

Parabiosis, the surgical generation of conjoined organisms sharing a common bloodstream, has been a powerful tool for studying hematopoietic cell migration and interaction with stromal niches in rodent and avian systems. We describe a technique to generate parabiotic zebrafish embryos based on blastula fusion. This procedure permits the in vivo visualization of hematopoietic cell migration and homing to niches and peripheral tissues in zebrafish parabiotes of different genetic backgrounds.