Featured Findings:

• Zebrafish acute toxicity study demonstrates concordance with rat fetal embryotoxicity 
  • As the zebrafish is increasingly adopted to test drug toxicity, it is critical to systematically assess the parallels between zebrafish, humans and other model systems. Data determining where phenotype anchors exist, and to what extent, is essential for understanding which areas zebrafish can serve best as a complementary system to mammalian models for facilitating the advancement of drug discovery and environmental monitoring efforts. Read more

• The Challenge of Getting CRISPR-based Knock-ins to Work in Zebrafish
  • As a community, we appreciate that getting CRISPR based knock-ins to occur efficiently in zebrafish is quite challenging.  We conducted a survey of zebrafish researchers, and all respondents agreed that getting knock-in transgenics is extremely difficult.  Our team has found that success can be higher with well designed reagents and processes. We are approaching an 80% success rate in the knock-in projects we have tried. Yet we need improvements in the process so that everyone can get access to higher efficiency knock-in transgenic production.
    Read more

• Seventeen Minutes of Science: Modeling Human Diseases in Zebrafish (Episode 4)
  • This week’s host is Ben Jussila, an R&D Scientist on our zebrafish team at InVivo Biosystems, who interviews Dr. Jen Phillips, a researcher at the University of Oregon in the Westerfield Lab, where she uses zebrafish to model rare diseases as a part of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network.
    Watch the interview

• Study finds damaged fertilized egg sends signal that helps mother live a longer healthy life 
  • Using the C. elegans model, a study out of Northwestern University determined that the health of the fertilized embryo determines the functional health of the mother, which has implications for healthy aging, stress resilience and suppression of protein damage Read more

• Zebrafish play a pivotal role in new Parkinson’s research
  • “Unlike rodent models of [Parkinson’s disease] that take months to run with just a few animals in each treatment group, the zebrafish model of Parkinson’s disease is a high throughput system,” Small-Howard said. “Each experiment takes about a week to complete and each treatment group has a minimum of twenty-five individuals, which makes statistical significance easier to reach quickly”…. Read more