Manipulating and Imaging the Early Xenopus laevis Embryo

Over the past half century, the Xenopus laevis embryo has become a popular model system for studying vertebrate early development at molecular, cellular, and multicellular levels. The year-round availability of easily fertilized eggs, the embryo’s large size and rapid development, and the hardiness of both adults and offspring against a wide range of laboratory conditions provide unmatched advantages for a variety of approaches, particularly “cutting and pasting” experiments, to explore embryogenesis. There is, however, a common perception that the Xenopus embryo is intractable for microscope work, due to its store of large, refractile yolk platelets and abundant cortical pigmentation. This chapter presents easily adapted protocols to surmount, and in some cases take advantage of, these optical properties to facilitate live-cell microscopic analysis of commonly used experimental manipulations of early Xenopus embryos.