Zebrafish models

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a small teleost fish that is highly fertile laying hundreds of eggs from a single mating daily. Embryos grow at an extremely fast rate, developing as much in a day as a mammalian embryo develops in days or weeks. Moreover, embryos are nearly transparent, which allows the examination of internal structures just using a bright-field stereo microscope. Zebrafish are easy to micro-manipulate for transient loss- or gain-of-function experiments, generation of transgenic lines or stable mutants through the Crispr/Cas9 technique. The genetic conservation with humans (70%) and the high percentage of human disease-related genes presenting the counterpart in zebrafish (84%), makes the model ideal for translational studies