Following a strategic decision to employ the zebrafish Danio rerio as a third genetic model system, in addition to Drosophila melanogaster and Mus musculus, the LIMES zebrafish lab was launched in year 2012, in cooperation with our Japanese partners at the TWIns Institute, Waseda University, Tokyo.
The first LIMES zebrafish project was inspired by ongoing Drosophila and mouse projects focussing on Ceramide synthases as one of the key enzymes of sphingolipid metabolism. The goal of the study was a thourough expression analysis of the Ceramide synthase gene family via whole mount imaging during zebrafish development (Brondolin et al. 2013).
Ongoing zebrafish projects have a common focus on the impact of nutrient and energy metabolism on essential organismic functions like Innate immune system and the central nervous system. To unravel novel gene functions and signaling networks, Crispr and TALEN based genome editing is applied to generate Knock-Out and Knock-In models.