Growing with the world: rapid development of the zebrafish research in China and the China Zebrafish Resource Center
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: ), a small tropical freshwater fish native to east India, has rapidly emerged as a popular verte-brate model organism in the last two decades. There are multiple advantages of using zebrafish in biological re-search, including its small size, short generation time of 23 months, external fertilization and development, high fecun-dity without seasonal variation, transparent embryos, and inexpensive maintenance. The well-annotated zebrafish genome contains more than 26,000 protein-coding genes, sharing over 80% similarity with human genome, and ap-proximately 70% of human genes have its zebrafish orthologues. Drug administration in zebrafish can be as simple as adding chemicals into fish water, and therefore it is doable to design projects with a small budget compared to mice and rats. Zebrafish is also famous for its amazing re-generative abilities, for instance, it can regenerate fins, hair cells, retina, even heart and brain. All these features make zebrafish a valuable animal model to dissect the mecha-nisms of biological processes and human diseases [1,2]. Zebrafish research started at University of Oregon in 1970s, when Dr. George Streisinger and his colleagues produced the first batch of zebrafish homozygous clones by early hydrostatic pressure method. In 1990s, the well-known Boston and Tubingen screens have successfully identified several thousand mutations with embryonic phe-notypes that consolidated the importance of zebrafish as an animal model in scientific research [3]. Since then the zebrafish model has been successful in forward genetic studies, which use alkylating or insertional mutagens to induce mutagenesis following with the screening of ob-servable phenotypes. The Sanger Institute started the zebrafish genome se-quencing project in 2001. Several assemblies have been generated and further improvements are released continu-ously. Accompanying with the full sequencing of the zebrafish genome, reverse genetic approaches have played more and more important roles in obtaining loss-of-function mutants and precise genome editing. Especially in recent years, the engineered endonucleases, e.g., transcription ac-tivator-like effector nuclease (TALEN) and guide RNA- CRISPR associated 9 nuclease (CRISPR/Cas9) [4], can ef-ficiently create double-strand breaks (DSBs) in target genes, and subsequently induce random indel into the DSB sites, or facilitate the introduction of exogenous sequences. In addi-tion, abundant transgenic fish resources have been generat-ed by Tol2 transposon system. For instance, ubiquitous or targeted expression of fluorescent proteins, and the use of GAL4/UAS system and CRE-loxP system in the zebrafish genome provide powerful tools to observe embryonic de-velopment and analyze gene functions [5]. While first established as a model to study vertebrate embryonic development, now zebrafish has been widely applied in the studies of genetics, organogenesis, regenera-tion, neurobiology, modelling human diseases, drug screen-ing and optimization, environmental biology and so on. In a recent assessment of PubMed publications, it is shown that
Source: Science China Life Sciences
Authors: XunWei Xie, LuYuan Pan, YongHua Sun
Language: English
Subfield: Cell Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,790
OpenAlex ID: W1998438281