Will This Fish Transform Medicine?
The New Lab Rat Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are one-inch-long freshwater animals that originate in south and southeast Asia. Nature Images/UIG/Getty ImagesWhy the tiny zebrafish is becoming many researchers' favorite animal The animal facility on the bottom floor of a drab building at Duke University is uncomfortably warm and smells a bit like raw seafood. That's not surprising given what's down there. The space holds a few thousand plastic fish tanks, each home to dozens of zebrafish: one-inch-long, big-eyed vertebrates that are becoming go-to research subjects for many scientists. Nico Katsanis, a Duke geneticist who hunts down the causes of rare illnesses, is one of a growing number of researchers choosing to work with zebrafish instead of rodents. Since scientists learned to selectively mutate zebrafish DNA in 1988-giving them the ability to turn the species into models of human diseases-the number of biomedical zebra-fish papers has skyrocketed, from 26 to 2,100 last year....