I'm currently on the hunt to find a reference chemical that reduces neutrophil and/or macrophage counts that I can use as a positive control in this assay moving forward. Any suggestions are very welcome!

I've been developing methods to image these fish on a high-content imaging platform called the Opera Phenix, which allows me capture 10x confocal images of an entire 96 well plate of fish and then analyze those images to pull out cell counts, all within the span of about 2 hours.

The idea behind the assay is that if a chemical of interest is developmentally immunotoxic, we could measure a change in the number of neutrophils or macrophages as a read out of that toxicity.

We have two transgenic lines of zebrafish in the lab that express fluorescent markers specifically in either macrophages or neutrophils (two key cell types of the innate immune system).

Throughout the past few months at the EPA, I've been working on a project to develop new methods to test for developmental immunotoxicity using zebrafish.