A free electronic management repository for zebrafish

Effective and efficient electronic systems for managing zebrafish colony operations are available but expensive. Researchers now offer an open-source electronic husbandry repository based on free Google applications that is cloud-based and can be managed using an everyday smartphone, making it accessible to all lab members. This new electronic system is described in Zebrafish.

In the article entitled "An Open-Source Husbandry Repository," Christopher Mark LaCoursiere, Jeremy Ullmann, and Annapurna Poduri, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA report on the increasing complexity of thousands of zebrafish colonies resulting from the maturation of the field and growing numbers of transgenic model organisms and reporter lines. All of these fish require careful tracking and effective organization methods. Through the use of applications such as Google Sheets and Google Forms, the repository can capture demographic metadata for differentiating strains, such as tank name, tank number, location, and parents. It can also help track fish mortality and fertilization, for example.

"The move to improve reproducibility in science is going to require some new tools for data capture and organization. This paper provides an innovative option for our zebrafish husbandry work that is accessible to any laboratory," says Stephen Ekker, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief of Zebrafish and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number Ro1NS100766-01. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.