Máté Varga

🌟 Meet the Scientific Committee: @filodelbene.bsky.social 🌟

Filippo del Bene is a member of the Scientific Committee of #EZM2026, and we are thrilled to have him join us in Vienna!

Stay tuned as we continue to introduce the outstanding scientists of EZM2026! 🐟🧬

🤯

Meet our keynote speakers at #EZM2026!
13th European Zebrafish Meeting, taking place in Vienna, July 7–11.

🧬 Elly Tanaka (IMP, Vienna) is a leader in the molecular and cellular biology of limb and spinal cord regeneration, with pioneering contributions to regenerative biology.

Thinking about EZM2026 in Vienna? 🐟
Travel grants are now open for students & ECRs.
7–11 July 2026 | Deadline: March 15
Hope to see many of you there! @ezsociety.bsky.social #zebrafish

🎉 Congratulations to Prof. Elizabeth Patton, recipient of the 2026 CNV Award! 🎉

Prof. Elizabeth Patton is a pioneer in zebrafish models for melanoma research and is renowned for her unwavering dedication to community service! Thank you! 🙏

Let's celebrate her at the #EZM2026 in Vienna! 🥂

Just discovered the wonderful covers of 'Genes to Cells', the journal of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan @mbsj-official.bsky.social – absolutely beautiful!

here some examples inspired by mitosis, CRISPR, the DNA helix, and plant pigments

Time for a thread on our Christmas preprint “Origin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apes”. I had so much fun with this project and paper. It will be hard to summarize in a thread, but I’ll try www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... [1/21]

📅EZM2026-Save the date!
We are delighted to welcome you to the 13th European Zebrafish Meeting in Vienna, Austria!

📑Submit your abstract by March 15 2026!

✅Early bird registrations are now open until April 15th 2026

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

I stand corrected! :)

And Goodrich has also abandoned later zebrafish for other fish species with intriguing patterns. But he remained affiliated with Wesleyan and also served as instructor for multiple MBL courses (including the one in 1939, where he was director: history.archives.mbl.edu/browse/exhib...). (9/9)

So why do we credit Creaser with introducing zebrafish to the scientific literature? His landmark paper in 1934 is on handling zebrafish and generating eggs: things that became extremely important for later geneticists and embryologists. (8/9) www.jstor.org/stable/1435845

The figures shows photomicrographs of the regenerating anal fin from the 1931 Goodrich paper. The anal fin was removed on October 9. Shown is a 40x picture taken on October 22 1930, with a 90x magnification in one area. The same area is als shown in 90x on October 25 1930.

What is even more remarkable, this might be also the paper with the first documented experiment on fin (albeit anal fin) regeneration (discussed in the context of pattern re-formation). See below at 13 and 16 dpi. (7/9)

That’s not all: in 1931 Goodrich “revisited” zebrafish and described the emergence of the color pattern in more detail in another paper (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...), which is still often quoted in papers on zebrafish pigmentation (openalex.org/works?filter...) (6/9)

But the D. rerio x D. malabaricus cross is a mysterious one. Malabar danios have been since reclassified in the Devario genus of the Danionidae family, and work from Francisco Pelegri’s lab showed that zebrafish - Devario hybrids are nonviable. (5/9) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The phenotype of different hybrids is shown: D. rerio × D. dangila, D. rerio × D. albolineatus, D. rerio × D. kerri, D. rerio × D. nigrofasciatus, D. albolineatus × D. nigrofasciatus and D. albolineatus × D. kerri.

I could not find the original Schreitmüller descriptions, but as for the D. rerio x D. albolineatus, we can always rely on earlier work from @dparichy.bsky.social, where these patterns have been described in detail (link.springer.com/article/10.1...). (4/9)

A list of crosses by Schreitmüller and some other aquarists from the article.

Briefly discussing crosses by various aquarists, Goodrich credits Wilhelm Schreitmüller (de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm...) in describing “Danio rerio" x "D. albolineatus" and “Brachydanio rerio" x “Danio malabaricus" crosses. (3/9)

Arguably, the oldest scientific paper that mentions zebrafish is his “Mendelian Inheritance in Fish” from 1929, where amongst lengthy discussions of inheritance of color patterns in guppies, medakas, swordfish and platyfishes, zebrafish also make a cameo. (2/9) www.jstor.org/stable/28082...

Photo of Hubert Baker Goodrich (1887-1963) from the Smithonian Learning Lab.

We usually credit Charles W. Creaser with the first scientific zebrafish paper, but that is true only with some caveats. Meet another strong contender, Hubert B. Goodrich, interested in all things related to fish genetics. (Photo: Smithsonian, prod.learninglab.si.edu/resources/vi...) (1/9)

It would seem logical, but I am not aware anyone else repeating this. (Which might very well be only me being ignorant, of course.)

Sadly, I could not find a real publication or any archival trace for this experiment, although I do think it was one of the coolest things she did in her long career. And yes, that includes sending killifish embryos into orbit on Cosmos-782 (nlsp.nasa.gov/view/lsdapub...). (4/4)

Introductory parts of the 1936 abstract: "8659 C Structures Developed in Amphibians by Implantation of Living Fish Organizer. JANE M. OPPENHEIMER.*(Introduced by J. S. Nicholas.) From Osborn Zoological Laboratory, Yale University. The study of mutual interactions between developing fish andamphibian tissue was tested by implanting parts of fish blastulxinto the blastwcele of developing amphibians. This method appliesalso t o the study of the capacity for differentiation of isolated em-bryonic cells of the teleostean. Halves of blastula of the eggs ofDanio rerio (the Zebra fish), isolated from their yolk an hourbefore the commencement of the visible processes of gastrulation,were implanted into the blastoccele of Triturus torosus eggs. Thehosts were fixed after 10 days of development."

Highlighted text from the results part of the abstract: "The induction consisted of well-differentiatedunilateral medulla, an auditory ganglion and an auditory vesicle.The indwed medulla formed 1)y the amphibian cells was similarin ccnfiguration to normal amphihian medulla; it was coextensivewith the fish notochord in length. In contrast to this, the inducedauditory vesicle u-as situated anterior to the fish notochord andthe induced amphibian medulla, and probably was induced directlyby the amphibian medulla."

Yet, in the same year (while still at Yale) she did publish an abstract in Proc. Soc. Exp. Biol. Med. about a transplantation experiment about which I was always dreaming as a PhD student (not knowing that it was done 70 years prior): putting a fish organizer into a newt embryo. (3/4)

Oppenheimer was very much into fish embryology, but that was mostly killifish (Fundulus), and not zebrafish. To give some perspective: in her epical "Historical Introduction to the Study of Teleostean Development” (1936) zebrafish is not even mentioned once. www.jstor.org/stable/301554 (2/4)

Photograph of Jane Marion Oppenheimer sitting at a microscope.

Next, in my miniseries on early researchers using zebrafish is Jane M. Oppenheimer, fish embryologist and science historian par excellence. (True, I’m cheating here a bit, but if I mentioned Hellen Battle in the previous bluetorial, it is fair to mention Oppenheimer here.) (1/4)

One more achievement for Hisaoka: as far as I could tell, he was amongst the first to suggest the use of breeding tanks to collect zebrafish eggs in his "Further Studies on the Embryonic Development of the Zebrafish, Brachydanio rerio (Hamilton-Buchanan)” paper from 1960. (8/8)

In 1963 he left academia to become an NIH Grants Associate. Soon he was the assoc. director for the NIDR Extramural Program, and then became head of the NINCDS Extramural Program. He was also a Judo expert, member of the US Judo Federation. Sadly, he died in 1978, at the age of 53, in cancer. (7/8)

He also made a movie of the developmental process, together with John Ott, a pioneer of time-lapse imaging (but sadly, this movie cannot be found in the Loyola Archives). (6/8)

At Loyola he continued his work on toxicology and teratology (openalex.org/works?page=1...) , but for this he also needed a more detailed developmental table, covering somitogenesis stages, so he published one with Battle, using phase contrast microscopy. (5/8)

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 - Wikipedia

In 1953 Hisaoka received his PhD from Rutgers and he got a job at Loyola, but initially was barred based on the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act to enter the US, and needed to get a special exemption to take up his position. (4/8) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigra...

Battle’s and Hisaoka’s first paper, "Effects of ethyl carbamate (urethan) on the early development of the teleost Brachydanio rerio” is from 1952, and in the Acknowledgements they credit Monte Moore, founder of Moore Water Gardens, providing the adult zfish. moorewatergardens.com/about-us/. (3/8)

Picture of a young Helen I. Battle standing on a pier with a big fish in her hands (on a stick) and a girl. A large water body and a shoreline can be seen in the background.

His involvement in toxicology was not by chance: he completed his MSc in the University of Western Ontario, where he was tutored by Hellen Battle - the legendary fish embryologist, educator and feminist. Shout-out to DFO-MPO for this badass picture of Battle: www.instagram.com/p/DAqidOtvsEM/. (2/8)