Zebrafish as a Model Organism

Zebrafish have recently gained huge scientific popularity as a Model Organism for human phenomena. Many factors cause them to be a great choice for research, including:

• High fertility: Zebrafish can have lots of offspring in one brood
• Short generation time - reaches sexual maturity in 1.5 months, full adulthood in 3
• Smaller space requirement that other vertebrate models like mice - make them a much more financially feasible option, in addition to being very inexpensive to purchase/ grow in general
• It is easy to produce large numbers of zebrafish in a laboratory setting
• Almost fully sequenced genome that is highly conserved with humans

For studying cardiovascular disorders:

• Heart function can be assessed visually - can visually monitor dynamic cellular events
• There are a huge variety of mutants that resemble human disorders
• Heart can regenerate quickly after injury
• Hearts are small enough that they can be essentially simplified to single cells for certain purposes, particularly Microelectrode,