Le petit poisson-zèbre, plein de potentiel!

Last week, we helped to organize an Alumnil event for Alumni of the University of Lausanne https://wp.unil.ch/alumnil/event/le-petit-poisson-zebre-plein-de-potentiel/.

Given that our audience had a very diverse background, Nadine first gave an introduction about model organisms in general, the zebrafish specifically, and the kind of research that is done with our little fish around the world and at UNIL. After that we had prepared three workshops. Gilles showed the fish room and explained how we keep our fish happy, and how we set up crosses to get embryos. Nadine hosted our guests in the injection room where embryos of different stages could be observed through the microscope. She also explained how we can inject 1-cell stage embryos for our experiments. Arianna then took the alumni to the lab and showed the different steps of a Western blot, which we use to check whether what we inject actually ends up in the embryos and in what amount.

It was a great evening with very enthusiastic participants. It was good there was a small Apéro after the workshops, so that there was some more time for discussion. We thank Jeyanthy Geymeier and Joëlle Rubli for organizing these events. If you are an alumnus of UNIL, you can register for upcoming events here: https://wp.unil.ch/alumnil/.