Nonlethal Blood Sampling from the Killifish

Blood withdrawal is a common procedure performed on laboratory animals to monitor key processes and indicators of fish health and physiology, such as hematopoiesis, hemostasis, and lipid and glucose metabolism. Moreover, the ability to extract blood with minimal invasiveness and without sacrificing animals enables repeated sampling, allowing both longitudinal studies of individual animals, as well as reducing the number of experimental animals needed in a study. The African turquoise killifish is an emerging animal model that is progressively being adopted worldwide for aging studies because of its naturally short life span. However, because of the small body size of this species, nonlethal blood collection is a challenging procedure. Here we present a detailed protocol enabling repeated blood sampling from the same individual fish. This method, if correctly executed, is minimally invasive and does not cause any lasting damage. The protocol has been tested on animals spanning from 6 to 24 wk of age and the amount of blood that could be extracted varied from 0.5 to 8 µL, greatly depending on specimen age, sex, and size. This volume is sufficient to perform analyses such as blood glucose measurement, blood cell counts, or histological stains on blood smears.

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