Zebrafish as a Translational Neuroscience Model: Today’s Science and Tomorrow’s Success

The world's modeling method has increasingly acquired interest in a small tropical vertebrate species, zebrafish. Zebrafish have common general strengths: economic efficiency, high fertility, a limited period of generation, external growth, optical clarity and genome manipulation. These characteristics have given researchers an unparalleled vertebrate experimental system with a capacity for live biological imaging and genetic and drug screening.

Zebrafish were used in neuroscience and developmental genetics and because of their high levels of genetic, anatomical, and physiological resemblance with humans they have also been used to study human diseases. In 2013, the publication of the Zebrafish reference genome accelerated disease modeling in this organism. More than 80% of the disease-causing human proteins have an ortholog in zebrafish. Furthermore, new therapeutic targets and molecules were identified or discovered using zebrafish that are now being considered for human trials or are waiting for clinical application. Nevertheless, more zebrafish models are needed to broaden our understanding of human diseases.

This subject offers updated insights from researchers from around the world on zebrafish as a model of translational neuroscience research.

This Research Topic aims to gather studies that take advantage of the zebrafish model to explore human neurological disorders. We encourage submissions of all article types falling under:
• The development of novel zebrafish disease models;
• The exploitation of established zebrafish models to gain novel understanding of disease mechanisms or illuminate new treatment strategies;
• Advances in technology with a direct impact on human brain disease modeling in zebrafish;
• Identification of novel biomarkers for various neurological disorders;
• Proteomics, and genomics brain research in zebrafish;
• Developmental brain research in zebrafish.