A fish barely a centimetre long just gave science its first full-body map of gene activity

Danionella cerebrum is a fish barely a centimetre long and so transparent you can see its brain through the top of its head. That tiny size let Whitehead Institute researchers do something never done before: profile more than 600,000 cells from across a whole adult vertebrate — brain, spinal cord, eyes, organs, fins — and map which genes are switched on in each cell. The atlas, published in Science and free for anyone to explore through an interactive tool called DigiFish, gives scientists a baseline for studying how the body heals: the team already used it to watch new neurons grow back after a brain injury. "To have the transcriptome of every cell type seems like a big turning point in how one would investigate the biology of an organism," says senior author Peter Reddien.

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