The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
In the same way, it is perhaps initially difficult to see how a small, freshwater fish from northern India – the zebrafish – could contribute to our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease. But it can. The zebrafish has some remarkable characteristics that make it especially suitable for studying how genes work normally and in disease situations. Like humans, zebrafish are vertebrates – animals with backbones – and they share many of the same genes. The fish are small, easy to breed and can be kept in small tanks at fairly high density. This makes them relatively cheap to care for which is important when considering how best to spend precious research dollars. For laboratory-based genetics research, it is important that an organism has a short generation time and produces large numbers of offspring. Zebrafish can produce a new generation in only three months and one female can produce tens of thousands of offspring in a lifetime. But the main advantage of zebrafish is that their embryos are transparent and develop outside the mother’s body.
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