Atlantic salmon seems an unlikely source of inspiration for a research gadget. Yet thanks to the fish – and the efforts of University of California, Berkeley researcher Boris Rubinsky – scientists have greater and more precise control over the delivery of nucleic acids to individual cells.
For years, Rubinsky watched technicians spend weeks at a time injecting individual salmon eggs with gene constructs to create transgenic fish that would grow year round and not only during the summer. The only alternative was to place all the eggs in one vessel between two electrodes and "hope for the best," says Rubinsky. But only about 20% of the eggs actually ended up with the gene constructs using this batch electroporation technique. Electroporation is a process in which a high-voltage current is used to open pores in the cell membrane in order to introduce nucleic acids, proteins, or other membrane-impermeable molecules. "The difficulty ...
