Year: 2022
Type: editorial
Abstract: Cavalieri, 2020). The general strengths of zebrafish over concurrent models are well known: ease of husbandry and maintenance in laboratory, high fecundity, external fertilization, short life cycle and generation time.Beyond this, the increasing popularity of zebrafish for epigenetic research purposes is due to two main reasons.First, components of the epigenetic machinery have been widely characterized in zebrafish, showing overall conservation with mammals (Howe et al., 2013;Cavalieri and Spinelli, 2017).No less important, zebrafish embryos are optically translucent and relatively permeable to a wide range of compounds, allowing non-invasive live imaging of morphogenesis and phenotypes following exposure to environmental stressors that challenge the epigenome (Godinho, 2011;Ali et al., 2014).Altogether, these benefits also make zebrafish an outstanding model for large-scale screening of potential therapeutics targeting epigenetic regulatory mechanisms.This Research Topic includes 7 original and review articles from 57 authors, covering key aspects of zebrafish research aimed at improving our understanding of the role of epigenetic mechanisms in biological processes occurring in zebrafish.For instance, Li et al. highlighted a positive correlation between neural induction aberrations and overexpression of the histone demethylases Kdm5a, Kdm5d, and Kdm7a in zebrafish morphants lacking the PRC1 member Pcgf1.They also observed decreased levels of both the repressive H3K27me3 and activating H3K4me3 marks at the promoter of pluripotent and neural markers, respectively, revealing that Pcgf1 might function as both a facilitator for pluripotent maintenance and a repressor for neural induction.
Authors: Vincenzo Cavalieri, Katie L. Kathrein
Institutions: University of Palermo, University of South Carolina
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,950
OpenAlex ID: W4290759754