The study of cell migration has been greatly enhanced by the development of new model systems and analysis protocols to study this process in vivo. Zebrafish embryos have been a principal protagonist because they are easily accessible, genetically tractable, and optically transparent. Neural crest cells, on the other hand, are the ideal system to study cell migration. These cells migrate extensively, using different modalities of movement and sharing many traits with metastatic cancer cells. In this chapter, we present new tools and protocols that allow the study of NC development and migration in vivo.
Keywords: Cell dissociation; Cell migration; Cell tracking; Clonal analysis; Gal4/Kalt4; In vivo imaging; Photoconversion; Tamoxifen; UAS; Zebrafish.