ZEBRAFISH (Danio rerio): INNOVATIVE ANIMAL MODEL USED IN BIOBIDE
Biobide's scientist department has developed the technology required for obtaining strains of zebrafish expressing GFP-cop (green fluorescent protein). This way it has been enabled a zebrafish pull containing a wide variety of:
- Transgenic lines for observation of heart and cardiac function development, or formation
of zebrafish´s cartilage/bone, etc.. - Mutant lines for which several characterised interesting phenotypes already exist.
- Transgenic lines for observation of the development and formation of zebrafish cartilage / bone.
Advantages of Zebrafish in High Throughput Screening (HTS):
- Vertebrate: many of its organs and cell types are similar to those of mamals.
- High genetic homology with humans: 85% similarity.
- Easy manipulation: external fertilization and embryogenesis.
- High productivity: 100-300 embryos per week/couple.
- Easy to study: transparent embryos.
- Short generational cycles: 2-3 months.
- Rapid organogenesis, with access to all stages of development.
- Laboratory conditioning advantage: due to size of adult fish´s size is approx. 3cm.
- Amounts of compound to be tested are very small.
- Compound administrated directly into aquatic medium.
- Testing has short experimentation times (3-5 days).
- Fewer ethical impediments as compared to other animal models.