Hubrecht Institute-KNAW & University Medical Center Utrecht, Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of The Netherlands, 3584 CT Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Cardiovasc Res. 2011 Jul 15;91(2):279-88. doi: 10.1093/cvr/cvr098. Epub 2011 May 19.
Over the last decade, the zebrafish has entered the field of cardiovascular research as a new model organism. This is largely due to a number of highly successful small- and large-scale forward genetic screens, which have led to the identification of zebrafish mutants with cardiovascular defects. Genetic mapping and identification of the affected genes have resulted in novel insights into the molecular regulation of vertebrate cardiac development. More recently, the zebrafish has become an attractive model to study the effect of genetic variations identified in patients with cardiovascular defects by candidate gene or whole-genome-association studies. Thanks to an almost entirely sequenced genome and high conservation of gene function compared with humans, the zebrafish has proved highly informative to express and study human disease-related gene variants, providing novel insights into human cardiovascular disease mechanisms, and highlighting the suitability of the zebrafish as an excellent model to study human cardiovascular diseases. In this review, I discuss recent discoveries in the field of cardiac development and specific cases in which the zebrafish has been used to model human congenital and acquired cardiac diseases.
在过去的十年中，斑马鱼作为一种新的模式生物进入了心血管研究领域。这主要是由于一些非常成功的小规模和大规模正向遗传筛选，这些筛选导致了具有心血管缺陷的斑马鱼突变体的鉴定。遗传图谱和受影响基因的鉴定导致了对脊椎动物心脏发育的分子调控的新见解。最近，斑马鱼已成为一种有吸引力的模型，可用于研究通过候选基因或全基因组关联研究在患有心血管缺陷的患者中鉴定的遗传变异的影响。由于基因组几乎完全测序以及与人类相比基因功能的高度保守性，斑马鱼在表达和研究与人类疾病相关的基因变异方面被证明非常有价值，为人类心血管疾病机制提供了新的见解，并强调了斑马鱼作为研究人类心血管疾病的优秀模型的适用性。在这篇综述中，我讨论了心脏发育领域的最新发现以及使用斑马鱼来模拟人类先天性和获得性心脏疾病的具体情况。
