Tobacco use is predicted to result in over 1 billion deaths worldwide by the end of the 21st century. How genetic variation contributes to the observed differential predisposition in the human population to drug dependence is unknown.Tobacco is a carrier for the highly addictive drug nicotine. Once your body gets a taste for nicotine, it can quickly become a life-long addiction, with extremely fatal consequences. Nicotine is the main drug in all forms of tobacco. Nicotine acts as both a stimulant and a sedative. It is one of the most heavily used addictive drugs in the U.S. The zebrafish is an emerging vertebrate model system for understanding the genetics of behavior. They developed a nicotine behavioral assay in zebrafish and applied it in a forward genetic screen using gene-breaking transposon mutagenesis. We show this insertional method generates mutant alleles that are reversible through Cre-mediated recombination, representing a conditional mutation system for the zebrafish. The combination of this reporter-tagged insertional mutagen approach and zebrafish provides a powerful platform for a rich array of questions amenable to genetic-based scientific inquiry, including the basis of behavior, epigenetics, plasticity, stress, memory, and learning. Looking at the figures below, the zebra fish were quite changed by the nicotine.
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