Studying the exome of e46 interleukin 10 mutant zebrafish (Danio rerio)

The zebrafish line e46 carrying a nonsense mutation in interleukin 10 gene was obtained from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Hinxton UK). In these mutant zebrafish a specific point mutation results in a stop codon after the first 27 amino acids in the translated region of exon 1. We used this line to study the role of interleukin 10 in Mycobacterium marinum infection in the zebrafish (Danio rerio). This infection has been widely used as a model to study human tuberculosis. Because this mutant line is produced with ENU mutagenesis, it may contain also other mutations besides e46. Those mutations could possibly contribute to our results. To investigate which mutations the line carries, we extracted the DNA of the progeny of heterozygous e46 mutant zebrafish and performed a whole genome sequencing analysis. We compared the coding region sequence of homozygous mutants and their wild type siblings to the sequence of wild type AB zebrafish and to the reference genome GRCz11.