Question: how are the zebrafish used for research?

Elliot Jokl answered on 15 Jun 2016:

Hello and thanks for the question!

Zebrafish are used for lots of different experiments in different labs. The thing that is really useful about zebrafish is that fish embryos (the baby fish) develop outside of the mother zebrafish and they are see through. This means you can watch a zebrafish as it develops, which is really cool (I’ll put a video at the bottom).

What you can also do is inject the embryo with bits of DNA and RNA and protein, and this can help you to figure out the function of different molecules. For example, you can put in some RNA (which is the blueprint for a protein) and this makes the fish embryo express a lot of that protein and you can see what it does. What I have done is inject some fish embryos with some molecules which cause a specific gene to become mutated. This will let me see what happens when the fish don’t have that gene, and help me see if that gene is as important for muscles in the fish as it seems to be in mice.

Other labs look at a whole variety of different things – one really cool thing is that if a zebrafish heart gets damaged, it can repair itself, which we can’t do! If we find out how the zebrafish does that, we might see if we can get our hearts to do a similar thing. They are very useful little fish!