Last Thursday, April 7, Estefanía Paredes, doctor at the University of Vigo and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee, presented, within the VI Café con Sal Program, the first steps towards the cryopreservation of zebrafish.
As Estefanía Paredes explained, “Vitrification is called cryopreservation that uses rapid freezing rates, usually over 50,000°C/min. When the freezing rate is so high, water freezes without forming ice crystals, instead an amorphous non-crystalline solid is formed. Until recently, it was thought that for successful vitrification it was critical to have a very rapid freezing rate and a high concentration of cryoprotective substances.” From Peter Mazur’s theoretical and applied cryopreservation laboratory, at the University of Tennessee, vitrification has been studied in detail and the results obtained contradict the established view in several aspects, establishing a new paradigm on vitrification.
Mazur’s lab, where Estefanía Paredes is developing her postdoctoral research, studied the application of new knowledge on vitrification of mouse embryos and oocytes to other model organisms that have not been cryopreserved to date or whose survival is limited. Among them: zebrafish embryos, mouse sperm, yeasts or microalgae.
“There has been a lot of progress in understanding how cryopreservation affects teleost eggs or embryos. Most of the experiments have been carried out with the most accepted vertebrate model, the zebrafish. So far, there have been some successes in relation to the cryopreservation of fish sperm. However, cryopreservation of fish eggs or embryos has not been achieved to this day,” says Estefanía. Estefanía Paredes’ studies on the resistance to dehydration of zebrafish embryos as well as the calculations of thawing rates in the embryo represent a step forward in the application of vitrification techniques for the future development of cryopreservation protocols in teleost embryos.
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