Robotic manipulation of zebrafish larvae for disease therapy

Zebrafish, and especially their larvae, are well-established small vertebrate model animals that have been increasingly investigated in the past decades among almost all the important fields of modern biology. In particular, zebrafish larvae can reflect organism-level pathology mechanisms that even the most sophisticated in vitro cell-based experiments cannot explore. The other advantages, such as the transparency of zebrafish larvae that enables in vivo imaging and the amenability to high-throughput applications, further motivates the research into disease therapy and drug discovery using zebrafish larvae. However, compared to other biological objects such as embryos or cells, zebrafish larvae present more complex morphology, more flexible motility, and more diverse mechanical properties, which largely motivates the introduction of robotic manipulation techniques to automate the laborious and time-consuming manual operation procedures. In this chapter, we aim to summarize the state-of-the-art robotic techniques for manipulating zebrafish larvae, following the general operation procedures including transportation, immobilization, orientation, and injection.