Whole embryo imaging of hematopoietic cell emergence and migration.

The use of transgenic mice in which tissue or lineage-specific, cell-restricted promoters drive fluorescent reporters has recently been reported as a means to follow the in vivo migration of various hematopoietic cells during murine development. At present there is limited ability of these approaches to image the emergence of the first hematopoietic cell subsets due to lack of unique markers that define those hematopoietic cells. We have utilized whole embryo analysis via immunostaining and confocal laser-scanning microscopic (CLSM) imaging to define the emergence of the first hematopoietic elements in the yolk sac of the developing conceptus. The methods employed to examine yolk sac hematopoiesis may be applied to hematopoietic cell emergence in the embryo proper or fetal liver in the generation of a complete map of hematopoietic ontogeny.