The zebrafish (Danio reiro) is a popular model organism. Like the frog, zebrafish embryos develop externally and can be viewed and manipulated at all stages. However, zebrafish development is more rapid than in the frog, the organization of the embryo is simpler and (like worms and fruit flies) the embryo is transparent. Like the mouse, the zebrafish is amenable to genetic analysis and has a similar generation interval (2-3 months). However, zebrafish are smaller than mice and they produce more offspring in a shorter time. A female zebrafish can lay up to 200 eggs per week, while a mouse may produce a litter of up to 15 embryos in 21 days.

It is easy to induce new mutations in zebrafish and large-scale screens have been carried out to identify mutations causing defects in particular biological processes, such as the developing nervous system. The technology for gene transfer to zebrafish is highly advanced. A number of zebrafish mutants have been produced that are good models of human diseases, and can therefore be used to test candidate drugs. These include models of Alzheimer’s disease, congenital heart disease, polycystic kidney disease and cancer. Currently, there are many sequence information available in the publicly available databases.

This project focusses on

1. Extracting sequence information for a set of EST sequences provided

2. Sequence analysis performed to find out more about their function

If you are interested to find out more about this project, please e mail yunping@bii.a-star.edu.sg