Advantages And Disadvantages Of Zebrafish

Zebrafish advantages: handling, breeding and imaging techniques

Zebrafish are one of the most important vertebrate model organism in biological research They are small (2-4 cm long) and robust; one pair of zebrafish can lay between 100-200 eggs in a single mating every week. The embryos after fertilization develop externally and the growth rate is very fast. For a large part of the development (till the larval stage) they are transparent and this is a great advantage for imaging during development. Indeed, there are many reporter lines to image zebrafish morphology and also physiology as electrical conduction, myocardial contraction, etc.(Nüsslein-Volhard C. and. Dahm, 2002). Their size is small enough to fit with the working distance of

Indeed, zebrafish is a good-established model to do preclinical tests on a large number of small molecules/drugs in cardiovascular disease (Berghmans et al.; 2008; Asnani and Peterson, 2014, Gut et al., 2017). “At now, are available 4 types of chemical screening assays on zebrafish: morphological screens (to screen chemical genetics and toxicology), behavioral screens (eg. use swimming kinetics to quantify the effects of the drug), fixed time-point/labeling assays (to get information on a cellular or tissue level) and fluorescence assays (reporter-based quantifications)” (Mathias et al.; 2012). The usual basic format of the small molecules/drugs screening starts positioning zebrafish embryos or larvae in a microtiter plate, at this point, compounds are administrate by immersion and at the end of the treatment is it possible to screen the fish (Peterson and Fisherman; 2004, Mathias et al.; 2012, Pylatiuk et al., 2014). Nice examples are: the development of a platform to detect automatically the heartbeat in zebrafish embryos to categorize the toxic levels of the compounds and to speed up the investigation of compounds to treat cardiac disease (Pylatiuk et al., 2014). And, a screening platform development to evaluate the cardiovascular toxicity of small compounds checking the hearbeat of isolated adult heart zebrafish keeped in ex-vivo culture (Kitambi et al.,