Why Zebrafish?

The Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a small teleost fish and a popular home aquarium fish.  It is ideally suited to study the fundamental processes underlying embryonic development, vertebrate development, physiology and the genetic basis of many human diseases.  In the last decade interest in using Zebrafish in studies in molecular biology and genetics has increased greatly.  Like humans, mice and rats, Zebrafish are animals with a segmented backbone (i.e. “vertebrates”) and they share many other anatomical similarities.

One of the most attractive reasons Zebrafish are becomming such a popular model organism is because the developing animal can be examined live (in real time).  This enables the development of powerful techniques such as creating timelapse movies like those seen below.

Zebrafish Movies
	Zebrafish embryogenesis View movie Karlstrom RO, Kane DA (1996). A flipbook of zebrafish embryogenesis. Development 123:461		Zebrafish caudal fin circulation View movie Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: NATURE CHEMICAL BIOLOGY Bayliss et al. (2006). Chemical modulation of receptor signaling inhibits regenerative angiogenesis in adult zebrafish, copyright 2006
	Time-lapse movie of Tg(fli1:negfp)y7 embryo View movie Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: NATURE Arndt and Lawson (2007). Notch signalling limits angiogenic cell behaviour in developing zebrafish arteries, copyright 2007		Time-lapse 2-photon imaging of red quantum-dot-injected embryonic zebrafish trunk vessels View movie Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: NATURE Kamei et al. (2006). Endothelial tubes assemble from intracellular vacuoles in vivo, copyright 2006

Zebrafish are particularly valuable for studying gene function as they are suitable for large scale genetic screens, transparent and genetically traceable. Their organ systems are very similar to those of humans and Zebrafish mutants provide excellent models of human disease.

The Zebrafish embryo is ideally suited to embryonic studies, providing strong statistical relevance due to their high number progeny production, rapid early development and ease of access.  This is because the embryos develop in an external environment and their optical transparency makes them very easy to study as either individual cells or tissues.