Tracking the cells descended from a multipotent cell in a specific tissue can provide information about how the tissue develops. These cells can usually give rise to different cell types in a specific organ, and generate more cells to replace any cells that die in that organ. Multipotent cells are cells that can produce daughter cells with different identities, including other multipotent cells. Eventually, this process will produce daughter cells with the identity of a specific tissue or organ and that cannot divide further. Once a cell acquires an identity, it usually cannot ‘go back’ and choose another. Every time a cell divides, each of its two daughter cells can either stay the same type as their parent or adopt a different identity. Using this system, we traced the hematopoietic potential of hemogenic endothelium (HE) in the posterior blood island (PBI) of zebrafish embryo and found that HEs in the PBI are heterogeneous, which contains at least myeloid unipotent and myeloid-lymphoid bipotent subtypes.ĭevelopmental biology heat shock hematopoiesis lineage tracing regenerative medicine single-cell labeling stem cells zebrafish.Īnimals begin life as a single cell that then divides to become a complex organism with many different types of cells. In vivo study indicated that this system can precisely label single cell in brain, muscle and hematopoietic system in zebrafish embryo. In this work, we developed a high-precision infrared laser-evoked gene operator heat-shock system, which uses laser-induced CreER T2 combined with loxP-DsRedx-loxP-GFP reporter to achieve precise single-cell labeling and tracing. Traditional bulk-labeling techniques are incompetent to dissect heterogeneity within cell population, while the new single-cell lineage tracing methodologies invented in the last decade can hardly achieve high-fidelity single-cell labeling and long-term in-vivo observation simultaneously. Investigating heterogeneity is crucial for comprehensively understanding the complexity of ontogeny, dynamics, and function of specific cell types. Heterogeneity broadly exists in various cell types both during development and at homeostasis.