An
article found on Medical News Today along with another
article talks about how the Zebra Fish can be used to understand how genes work in health and disease. The zebra fish shares 70% of its protein coding genes with humans, and 84% of its overall genome. Due to this astonishing fact, the zebra fish's genome is one of three that has been sequenced in great depth. The other two are the human and the mouse. This genome will be crucial to studying diseases in humans in ways that cannot be studied. Zebra fish research has already been used to understand cancer, heart disease and muscular dystrophy. Scientists are hoping to use the genome to undertand the function of specific genes and develop medicines.
The zebra fish is unlike most other vertebrates. They have the highest repeat content in their genome sequences as well as genes that code for sex determination. The zebrafish also has very few pseudogenes, or genes that have lost function through evolution, compared to the human genome.
"Armed with the zebrafish genome, we can now better understand how changes to our genomes result in disease," said Professor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, author and Nobel laureate from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.
This discovery is interesting to me because of the fact that this little fish commonly found in peoples fish tanks can help figure out human diseases. It is crazy to think that the human genome and the zebra fish's genome is 84% compatible overall. Hopefully we can use these little fish to finally figure out cures for horrible diseases.
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