PICS: How zebrafish gets its stripes!

However, the black and silvery cells come from a small set of stem cells associated with nerve nodes located close to the spinal cord in each segment. The black cells reach the skin migrating along the segmental nerves to appear in the stripe region, whereas the silvery cells pass through the longitudinal cleft that separates the musculature and then multiply and spread in the skin. The research was published in the journal Science.