Zebrafish as a model system for drug target screening and validation

Abstract

The zebrafish is becoming an increasingly popular model organism to study human diseases. Novel assays have been and continue to be developed to study human diseases in this model. Methods to identify novel drug targets using zebrafish include chemical mutagenesis, insertional mutagenesis and small-molecule screens. Methods to validate potential drug targets include morpholino antisense knockdown technology and target-selected mutagenesis approaches. Here we review advances in these and related technologies.