Veldman Matthew B, Lin Shuo
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.
Pediatr Res. 2008 Nov;64(5):470-6. doi: 10.1203/PDR.0b013e318186e609.
Zebrafish has many advantages as a model of human pediatric research. Given the physical and ethical problems with performing experiments on human patients, biomedical research has focused on using model organisms to study biologic processes conserved between humans and lower vertebrates. The most common model organisms are small mammals, usually rats and mice. Although these models have significant advantages, they are also expensive to maintain, difficult to manipulate embryonically, and limited for large-scale genetic studies. The zebrafish model nicely complements these deficiencies in mammalian experimental models. The low cost, small size, and external development of zebrafish make it an excellent model for vertebrate development biology. Techniques for large-scale genome mutagenesis and gene mapping, transgenesis, protein overexpression or knockdown, cell transplantation and chimeric embryo analysis, and chemical screens have immeasurably increased the power of this model organism. It is now possible to rapidly determine the developmental function of a gene of interest in vivo, and then identify genetic and chemical modifiers of the processes involved. Discoveries made in zebrafish can be further validated in mammals. With novel technologies being regularly developed, the zebrafish is poised to significantly improve our understanding of vertebrate development under normal and pathologic conditions.
斑马鱼作为人类儿科研究的模型具有诸多优势。鉴于对人类患者进行实验存在身体和伦理问题，生物医学研究聚焦于使用模式生物来研究人类与低等脊椎动物之间保守的生物学过程。最常见的模式生物是小型哺乳动物，通常是大鼠和小鼠。尽管这些模型有显著优势，但维护成本高昂，胚胎操作困难，且在大规模基因研究方面存在局限性。斑马鱼模型很好地弥补了哺乳动物实验模型的这些不足。斑马鱼成本低、体型小且胚胎体外发育，使其成为脊椎动物发育生物学的优秀模型。大规模基因组诱变和基因定位、转基因、蛋白质过表达或敲低、细胞移植和嵌合胚胎分析以及化学筛选等技术极大地提升了这种模式生物的研究能力。现在能够在体内快速确定感兴趣基因的发育功能，然后识别相关过程的遗传和化学修饰因子。在斑马鱼身上的发现可在哺乳动物中进一步验证。随着新技术不断涌现，斑马鱼有望显著增进我们对正常和病理条件下脊椎动物发育的理解。
