Zebrafish as a model of genetic disease

The zebrafish is rapidly becoming a vital tool in studies of genetic disease. Use of the zebrafish embryo as an experimental model combines the efficiency of techniques specific to invertebrates with the human applicability of vertebrate studies, along with a number of other advantages such as optical transparency and high spawn number. These papers trace the development of zebrafish embryos as a model organism for both genetic disease and, as part of this, the development of a relatively high throughput approach to analysing relative levels of apoptosis. The first paper describes the fmr1 gene family in zebrafish (fmr1, and its orthologs fxr1 and fxr2). The conclusions are that the zebrafish is an appropriate model in which to study Fragile X Mental Retardation genetic disease. The second paper builds upon this conclusion and further establishes the appropriateness of the model by recapitulating elements of the disease that had already been modelled in other model organisms. As the zebrafish becomes more widely accepted as a model for a diverse range of scientific questions, the development of such a technique is doubly important given the necessity of a cheap, reliable and simple generalizable method of analysing processes affecting cell viability in fish. This has clear importance for pharmacological studies, but is also a long overdue addition to the battery of controls available for highly invasive techniques such as microinjection, in which apoptosis is regularly found among its non specific effects.