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Briefings in Functional Genomics Advance Access originally published online on September 10, 2008
Briefings in Functional Genomics 2008 7(6):483-490; doi:10.1093/bfgp/eln040
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Chemobehavioural phenomics and behaviour-based psychiatric drug discovery in the zebrafish

David Kokel and Randall T. Peterson

Corresponding author. David Kokel, Cardiovascular Research Center and Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th Street, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA. E-mail: dkokel{at}cvrc.mgh.harvard.edu or Randall Peterson, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 7 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. Tel: (617) 724-9569; Fax: (617) 726-5806; E-mail: Peterson{at}cvrc.mgh.harvard.edu

Despite their ubiquity and impact, psychiatric illnesses and other disorders of the central nervous system remain among the most poorly treated diseases. Most psychiatric medicines were discovered due to serendipitous observations of behavioural phenotypes in humans, rodents and other mammals. Extensive behaviour-based chemical screens would likely identify novel psychiatric drugs. However, large-scale chemical screens in mammals are inefficient and impractical. In contrast, zebrafish are very well suited for high-throughput behaviour-based drug discovery. Furthermore, the vast amounts of data generated from large-scale behavioural screens in zebrafish will facilitate a systems-level analysis of how chemicals affect behaviour. Unlike serendipitous discoveries in mammals, a comprehensive and integrative analysis of zebrafish chemobehavioural phenomics may identify functional relationships that would be missed by more reductionist approaches. Thus, behaviour-based chemical screens in the zebrafish may improve our understanding of neurobiology and accelerate the pace of psychiatric drug discovery.

Keywords: phenomics, chemical genetics, zebrafish


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