To analyse cardiac gene expression profiles during zebrafish heart development, total RNA has to be extracted from isolated hearts. Here, we present a protocol for collecting functional/beating hearts by rapid manual dissection from zebrafish embryos to obtain cardiac-specific mRNA.
Lombardo, V. A., Otten, C., Abdelilah-Seyfried, S. Large-scale Zebrafish Embryonic Heart Dissection for Transcriptional Analysis. J. Vis. Exp. (95), e52087, doi:10.3791/52087 (2015).