Zebrafish

Zebrafish, a model organism

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a popular model organism in biomedical & toxicology research which allows for the study of mechanisms at the genetic, cellular and developmental level.

Zebrafish share a high degree of genetic and physiological similarity to mammals, including humans. They possess similar major biological and developmental processes and structures with comparative functionality. Their genome is well characterised and its sequencing is complete, showing more than 70% of human genes to have at least one zebrafish orthologue and 84% of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart (Howe et al., 2013). Alongside practical qualities such as their small size, quick reproduction and short generation time, their external fertilisation and transparent embryo enables in vivo monitoring during early-stage development.

Zebrafish also display a range of behavioural phenotypes that resemble aspects of human disease (Kalueff et al., 2013) & they are becoming a popular organism to study the molecular basis of behaviour (McCarroll et al., 2016, Mathur & Guo, 2010 ).The developing embryo can be treated pharmacologically, providing an in vivo animal model for a high-throughput screen. Behavioural evaluation in zebrafish is a new field with some problems of reproduceability (Gerlai, 2018) as in other areas of behavioural research, and Zantiks units are designed to overcome many of these.

Behavioural assays

A wide variety of behavioural assays can be automated in all of the Zantiks units including:

Adult zebrafish

• 5-Choice serial reaction time task
• Conditioned Place Preference (CPP)
• Light/Dark Preference test
• Match to Sample
• Mirror biting test
• Novel tank diving
• Pavlovian avoidance learning
• Predator avoidance test
• Social preference test
• Two-choice discrimination

Larval zebrafish

• Habituation / non-associative learning
• Light/Dark locomotion test
• Optomotor response
• Prepulse inhibition
• Startle response
• Thigmotaxis (edge preference)
• Social interaction & aggression

Please contact us if you have any specific behavioural studies in mind.

References

Gerlai, R (2018). Reproducibility and replicability in zebrafish behavioral neuroscience research. Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbb....

Howe, K., Clark, M., Torroja, C., Torrance, J., Berthelot, C., Muffato, M., … Al., E. (2013). The zebrafish reference genome sequence and its relationship to the human genome. Nature, 496(7446), 498–503.

Kalueff, A. V., Gebhardt, M., Stewart, A. M., Cachat, J. M., Brimmer, M., Chawla, J. S., … Gaikwad, S. (2013). Towards a comprehensive catalog of zebrafish behavior 1.0 and beyond. Zebrafish, 10(1), 70–86.

Mathur, P., & Guo, S. (2010). Use of zebrafish as a model to understand mechanisms of addiction and complex neurobehavioral phenotypes. Neurobiology of Disease, 40(1), 66–72.

McCarroll, M. N., Gendelev, L., Keiser, M. J., & Kokel, D. (2016). Leveraging large-scale behavioral profiling in zebrafish to explore neuroactive polypharmacology. ACS Chemical Biology, 11(4), 842–849.