I think a lot of people when they think
about um animals in research they often
think about mice or primates right and
these
things uh are popular models to study in
research because they're evolutionarily
very similar to
humans um but a lot of people don't
think about things like zebra fish in
research and I think it's because they
look very different but in reality you
know they have a lot of similar Anatomy
they have eyes they have a mouth they
have um very similar skin to humans for
example they have hearts they have all
these components that um we still use as
humans and interestingly they actually
have about 70% similarities uh in their
genomes compared to human genomes and
this is actually one of the most
interesting Parts about zebra fish 2
because we've developed veloped a whole
set of tools to be able to manipulate
their genomes so we can easily cause uh
disruptions in some of the similar genes
that zebra fish have to humans and so in
a lot of human diseases we've traced
back some of these um diseases to
particular genes and if we then uh
translate this to zebra fish we can
basically cause mutations the same types
of mutations that are in human diseases
in zebra fish and recapit at some of
these diseases so for example uh
melanoma is a very widespread type of
cancer in humans it's a cancer of the
skin and there are some particular
mutations known to cause melanoma well
if we cause those same mutations in the
same genes in zebra fish we can actually
cause a zebra fish to develop melanomas
in their skin as well so not only do
zebra fish have a lot of similar organs
but it seems like the way that their
genes are working working in their cells
is uh in a way that's very similar to
humans and so why are zebra fish so
popular compared to mammals um there's a
lot of reasons so zebra fish for one
when they spawn or mate with each other
they produce hundreds and hundreds of
Offspring versus things like mice might
only produce say 10 pups and because we
can produce so many from Individual
crosses we can um do what we call High
throughput screenings so we can take
these uh baby zebra fish for lack of
better words and we can treat them with
different drugs or we can manipulate
their genes in different ways and we can
see how these things affect uh a large
amount of zebra fish instead of causing
mutations in maybe just a handful of
mimes but in zebra fish we can easily
cause these perturbations in hundreds of
animals and see how that's affecting um
the organism and we can get a a better
look a more robust look at how these
perturbations are uh affecting the
animals additionally zebra fish are a
popular model organism because they
develop externally
so the zebra fish lay eggs that are
fertilized outside of the body versus
mammals like Pates or mice they have um
uh their embryos develop in utero So
within the mother of the animals so
because the zebra fish larvae or embryos
are developing externally this makes it
easy for us researchers to uh actually
observe them during development so we
can watch cells move around we can see
the organs develop uh and it also makes
it very easy to manipulate their
genes