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Read more about the article Man-made chemicals PFAS surround us, and you did not even know about their toxic effect: what zebrafish can tell us
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Man-made chemicals PFAS surround us, and you did not even know about their toxic effect: what zebrafish can tell us

In this series of articles, we review some of the key scientific publications of 2020 which included zebrafish in their studies. This second review will cover an article published in Environmental Health Perspective on April 9th 2020: Evaluation of Developmental Toxicity, Developmental Neurotoxicity, and Tissue Dose in Zebrafish Exposed to GenX and Other PFAS1.In this article, the authors have studied the toxicology of different PFAS, short for poly and perfluoroalkyl substances, which are substances widely present in our daily life.PFAS and concerns about their useGrouping PFAS based on shared toxicity…

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26 April 2021
Read more about the article Studying breast cancer with zebrafish: a case study
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Studying breast cancer with zebrafish: a case study

In this new series of articles, we will review some of the key scientific publications of 2020 which included zebrafish in their studies. This first review will cover an article published in Clinical Cancer Research on March 15th 2020: Deubiquitinase Activity Profiling Identifies UCHL1 as a Candidate Oncoprotein that Promotes TGFβ-induced breast cancer metastasis1.In this article, the authors have focused their research on a subset of proteins involved in the tumour cell intracellular degradation pathway as a potential treatment for breast cancer. To get a full comprehensive overview of the…

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29 March 2021
Read more about the article Small model organisms
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Small model organisms

Over the past years, zebrafish have proven to be excellent model systems for a wide panel of experiments. We have discussed throughout our previous articles their advantages and disadvantages, how they could be incorporated to various research fields and different automation techniques which facilitate their handling in laboratories. Today we will discuss 4 other model organisms: Drosophila melanogaster, Xenopus laevis, Caenorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana, all have in common their genetic similarity to humans, their ease of care and prolific breeding. While this last feature is particularly useful for studies requiring…

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14 December 2020
Read more about the article Studying zebrafish behaviour: robotics and automation
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Studying zebrafish behaviour: robotics and automation

In today's article we will take a step back from zebrafish embryos and discuss how adult zebrafish collective behaviours can be studied using robotic systems.Danio rerio, commonly known as zebrafish is a small but robust cyprinid, commonly found in food plains of the south of Asia, particularly India. They thrive in shallow and slow flowing-waters and can generally be found in standing water bodies, often connected to rice cultivation. This is most likely due to the high content of zooplankton in rice cultivations, a major component of the zebrafish diet. Zebrafish…

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30 November 2020
Read more about the article Morphological and phenotypic characteristics of zebrafish embryos
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Morphological and phenotypic characteristics of zebrafish embryos

In our modern world, development of new synthetic compounds and chemicals is essential for many industries, such as the pharmaceutical, clothing and food industries. This has become a major public and environmental issue as many of these compounds can be toxic and detrimental to human and animal health. In addition to these artificial toxins, chemicals can occur naturally in the environment such as heavy metals or nitrates. Although it is widely recognised that such compounds can cause damage to life, how harmful they are and how they cause disease needs…

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16 November 2020
Read more about the article Zebrafish early embryo sorting
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Zebrafish early embryo sorting

Over the past 20 years, the use of zebrafish in the lab has dramatically increased. In 2000, PubMed displayed 657 articles when searching for “zebrafish”. In 2020, that number shot up to 3’979 publications (1). This is most likely due to the many advantages zebrafish represent as an animal model (and which are resumed in our article What are zebrafish). Particularly, their high breeding capacity is a very interesting asset for experiments requiring large sample sizes. Zebrafish can indeed produce up to 300 embryos weekly, hence why they are referred…

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2 November 2020
Read more about the article Artificial Intelligence for zebrafish egg sorting
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Artificial Intelligence for zebrafish egg sorting

Artificial intelligence always triggers a lot of curiosity when mentioned around a dinner table. AI brings in mind to a lot of people the latest fantastic movie released in the cinema with cool robots and futuristic computer systems. In reality and up until today, AI is really the science of giving to a material device the ability to show cognitive behaviour similarly to humans in order to learn and solve complex problems. AI is very present in our everyday lives and its development and achievements made in various fields is…

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19 October 2020
Read more about the article High-throughput screening and automation technologies for zebrafish assays
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High-throughput screening and automation technologies for zebrafish assays

Although zebrafish have been described numerous times as ideal organism models, manual handling of zebrafish embryos can turn out to be complex and time consuming due to their small size and the large quantities of samples usually required in an experimental setup (1). To increase efficiency of such studies, it has been crucial to develop fast and automated screening methods.  In this article we will discuss various high-throughput screening methods and automation technologies which have been developed and proven to be very helpful for zebrafish embryo and larval assays. What…

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5 October 2020
Read more about the article Using zebrafish for drug testing
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Using zebrafish for drug testing

Toxicology studies have proven to be quite translatable from zebrafish to mammals. As a matter of fact, concordance between studies ran on zebrafish and rodents can reach up to 87% (1). Therefore, the use of zebrafish in the fields of pharmacology and toxicology is opening new and innovative ways to test and develop new drug compounds and understand underlying disease mechanisms.In this article, we will briefly address the process of drug development and clinical research, ways in which zebrafish are used in the pharmaceutical industries; and the bottlenecks and issues potentially involved.Drug…

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21 September 2020
Read more about the article Reducing animal experimentation thanks to zebrafish
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Reducing animal experimentation thanks to zebrafish

The use of animals for scientific research and experimentations started over 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece (1). Although initial experiments were purely observational and comparative with the intent to learn more about human physiology and anatomy, animals quickly became models for translational research in numerous biological fields, mostly to contribute to human and animal health.In this article, we will discuss the importance of animal experimentation for research, some animal welfare concerns, as well as laws and regulations which frame research good practices and finally how zebrafish are an interesting…

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7 September 2020