After a fruitful collaboration with Prof. Shinji Kanda at the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues in China, our PhD student, Muhammad Rahmad Royan has just published his second paper after the review on pituitary plasticity by sex steroids.
Royan has spent about 1 month and a half in Japan in the laboratory of Prof. Kyoshi Naruse and in the laboratory of Prof. Shinji Kanda where he learned medaka egg injection, gonadectomy, blood sampling and ELISA for sex steroids.
He is now using these techniques on a daily routine for his PhD project, and while waiting the scientific publication, he has written a technical paper describing the techniques of gonadectomy and blood sampling in medaka that has just been released on in Journal of Visualised Experiment (JoVE).
Abstract: Sex steroids, produced by the gonads, play an essential role in brain and pituitary tissue plasticity and in the neuroendocrine control of reproduction in all vertebrates by providing feedback to the brain and pituitary. Teleost fishes possess a higher degree of tissue plasticity and variation in reproductive strategies compared to mammals and appear to be useful models to investigate the role of sex steroids and the mechanisms by which they act. The removal of the main source of sex steroid production using gonadectomy together with blood sampling to measure steroid levels has been well-established and fairly feasible in bigger fish and is a powerful technique to investigate the role and effects of sex steroids. However, these techniques raise challenges when implemented in small size teleost models. Here, we describe the step-by-step procedures of gonadectomy in both males and female Japanese medaka followed by blood sampling. These protocols are shown to be highly feasible in medaka indicated by a high survival rate, safety for the life span and phenotype of the fish, and reproducibility in terms of sex steroid clearance. The use of these procedures combined with the other advantages of using this small teleost model will greatly improve the understanding of feedback mechanisms in the neuroendocrine control of reproduction and tissue plasticity provided by sex steroids in vertebrates.
The paper can be found here: https://www.jove.com/t/62006/gonadectomy-blood-sampling-procedures-small-size-teleost-model
