Perspectives of zebrafish as an animal model in the biomedical science

A large number of animals from nonvertebrate to mammals have been used in biomedical research to generate in vivo preclinical data. Selection of an ideal animal model depends on several factors such as research goal, nature of disease and quick answer to discovery question. Zebrafish is a small freshwater vertebrate. In the milieu of human diseases, it is more relevant animal model than nematode C. elegans and fruit fly Drosophila. Mice and rats share around 90% of their genome with human, whereas zebrafish share about 70% of its genome with human and around 85% of diseases associated human genes have a homolog in zebrafish. Zebrafish embryos develop externally outside the mother and their body are transparent which facilitate easier manipulation and monitoring during organogenesis, it makes zebrafish advantageous over other animal models. The genome of this model has been fully sequenced, they have shorter life cycle (several hours to start somitogenesis and 2.5 months to become adult) and each pair of adults can give around 500 embryos weekly. A PubMed search study (search key words “biomedical” and “zebrafish”) from 2012 to 2019 has observed a gradual increase in the number of publications. Many laboratories in the field of genetics, toxicology, neurobiology, oncology, molecular biology, and developmental biology are using zebrafish to study human diseases. Our laboratory using zebrafish since 2017 to study developmental toxicology, chemical toxicology, developmental senescence and cellular autophagy. We expect our zebrafish implicated investigation will encourage and support our researchers to utilize zebrafish in their researches