Stochasticity also appears to be a feature of cell fate assignment. We therefore speculate that all vertebrate retinas, though vastly different in size and the proportional composition of different cell types, may follow similar stochastic rules but tune their proliferative and cell fate probabilities

to arrive at appropriate species-specific retinal sizes and cellular compositions. Zebrafish lines were maintained and bred at 26.5°C. Embryos were raised at 28.5°C and staged in hours postfertilization (hpf). Embryos were treated with 0.003% phenylthiourea (PTU, Sigma) at 8 hpf to delay pigmentation and were anaesthetised by 0.04% MS-222 (Sigma) prior to live imaging. All animal work was approved by Local Ethical Review Committee at the University of Cambridge and performed according to www.selleckchem.com/products/BAY-73-4506.html the

selleck compound protocols of UK Home Office license PPL 80/2198. Geminin-GFP (Tg(EF1α:mAG-zGem(1/100))rw0410h), UAS-Kaede, and MAZe transgenic lines have been described previously (Collins et al., 2010; Scott and Baier, 2009; Sugiyama et al., 2009). H2B-GFP transgenic line was generated by injection of the actin promoter-driven H2B-GFP DNA construct. The cell number of entire retinas or individual cell types was formulated by multiplying the cell density by the volume of retinas (or individual cell layers). To measure the volume, CYTH4 we acquired the confocal z stacks of entire retinas at distinct stages (24, 32, 48, 52, and 72 hpf) on the inverted confocal microscope (Olympus FV1000) equipped with 40× oil objective (NA = 1.3). The surfaces of retinas were created based on retinal confocal stacks using the contouring adaptive tools in Imaris 7.3 (Bitplane). To distinguish different cell layers, we crossed the H2B-GPF line with the Ptf1a-DsRed line, in which all layers were separated in space by the Ptf1a-DsRed labeling and the surface of individual layers therefore could be reliably generated. The resultant surface was further used to calculate the volume using the

statistics tool in Imaris 7.3. Cell density was estimated by counting the number of cells in given 1 μm sagittal section acquired using the confocal microscope (Olympus FV1000), at a depth in which all the cell layers were present, followed by a necessary correction using the protocol outlined in Figure S7. Cell number in retina sections (or individual cell layers) was counted manually using ImageJ or Photoshop CS5 (Adobe), and the corresponding areas were measured using the contouring adaptive and statistics tools in Imaris 7.3. Twenty-four hour postfertilization embryos embedded in 1% low-melting agarose (type IV, Sigma) were prepared in the Steinberg’s solution (100× stock: 0.5 g KCl, 0.8 g Ca(NO3)2 × 4H2O, 2.1g MgSO4 × 7H2O, 34 g NaCl, 119 g HEPES, to 1 l dd H2O [pH 7.