Developing systems for high-throughput screening of infectious diseases using zebrafish

Infectious diseases are everywhere around us, and we need to keep improving our knowledge about our defence mechanisms and the evasion strategies of the pathogens. The work in this thesis describes multiple techniques that can contribute to fast screening methods in order to come up with new strategies against infectious diseases. The use of automated micro-injectors in combination with large flow cytometers and automated microscopy has shown added value (chapters 2, 3 & 4) for research questions about (opportunistic) pathogens. The collaboration between scientists of different research areas has proved to be very successful in the development of an easy to use analysis platform for the analysis of RNAseq data (chapter 5). This has led to very detailed description of host molecular expression patterns following infection by these pathogens. This could be used to gain more insight in how biomaterials behave in a host environment in the presence or absence of infection (chapter 6). All together this has led this to a variety of research methods that can be used for studies of infections caused by many bacteria such as S. epidermidis and M. marinum described in this thesis, but, also by other microbes, such as fungi. zebrafish, Staphylococcus-epidermidis, Mycobacterium-marinum, high-throughput,screening, method-development, transcriptome-analysis, molecular-cell-biology, immunology, host-pathogen-interaction; disease-modelsThis research forms part of the Project P5.03 IBIZA of the research program of the BioMedical Materials institute, co-funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic AffairsAnimal science