Zebrafish: A New Model for Human Disease
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Children’s Hospital of Boston, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Picture this—you have just mapped a human disease locus to a particular region of a chromosome. With a click of a computer button, the region of chromosomal synteny in the zebrafish (Danio rerio) genome is revealed. Behold, there are several mutant zebrafish loci mapped in this general region of synteny. Another click and you find a fish mutant resembling your human disease. Further clicking reveals several independent alleles with varying phenotypes establishing the pathophysiology of the human disease. Does this sound farfetched? Well, recently several zebrafish mutants with “human” diseases have been found. With more infrastructure for the zebrafish system, the above scenario could become commonplace.
The zebrafish is an excellent system for developmental biologists and geneticists (Westerfield 1989; Detrich et al. 1999). The externally developing embryos are clear, allowing visualization of organ systems. The 1-inch size of the zebrafish allows large numbers of these vertebrates to be maintained in a relatively small space. In addition, each female lays >200 eggs per week. This enables the study of large numbers of meioses for positional cloning purposes. The genetic map has been continually improving over the past 2 years, and currently >2000 microsatellite markers and up to 400 genes …
