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Big fish in the genome era
Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, NICHD, NIH
Bethesda, MD, 20892, USA
E-mail: flyingfish2@nih.gov
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Two diminutive fish, the zebrafish and Medaka, have recently been swimming into view as important new model organisms for biomedical research. Although both species have been around as experimental models for many years, in the last decade or so they have emerged as a major new players in developmental genetics research, and more recently as models for human disease. The explosive growth of fish as research model organisms has been fueled at least in part by the development of new, powerful, genome-based tools and resources for scientific research in fish, some of which are discussed in the eight reviews in this issue.
Although the zebrafish had been used as a research model since before the end of the Second World War, mainly for teratology and toxicology studies (reviewed in [1]), the use of the zebrafish as a genetic and experimental embryologic model organism really began with the work