Crazy danios
The fish helped to study the body's response to chronic stress
Maria Cherednik, "Indicator"
An international group of researchers, including Russian ones, studied the effect of chronic stress on the body of Danio rerio fish.
They found out that the body of such a fish is a good and effective model for the study of mental illness. Scientists have also suggested that this type of disorder can lead to more serious, incurable diseases. Scientists told more about the study in the journal Scientific Reports (Demin et al., Understanding complex dynamics of behavioral, neurochemical and transcriptomic changes induced by prolonged chronic unpredictable stress in zebrafish).
Danio rerio is a species of freshwater ray–finned fish. Due to certain properties of the body, danio rerio has become an effective visual model in genetics, molecular biology, embryology, pharmacology and, not so long ago, in neurobiology. These fish are used in research because both fry and adult fish have quite complex behavior. This means that they can be used to investigate various pathologies and see how the state of the body changes under the influence of the studied diseases. In their work, scientists created danio rerio conditions of five weeks of chronic unpredictable stress in order to investigate disorders of human consciousness that include the same conditions. These neuropsychiatric disorders, widespread, debilitating and often untreatable, represent an urgent, unresolved biomedical problem. In the course of the study, the fish were diagnosed with a stressful state and a deficiency of serotonin metabolism.
In addition, in danio rerio, the principle of operation of many organ systems, in particular the cardiovascular system, the similarity of signaling pathways, as well as the identity of genomes in 87% allow translating the results of studies on fish to the human body. This means that reliable results can be obtained in the study of certain drugs, for example, for their toxicity. For the treatment of danio rerio, scientists injected the antidepressant fluoxetine into the body of fish for 11 days and monitored neurochemical and behavioral changes. The medication used reduced the severity of the symptoms of the disease, and the result was also confirmed by transcriptomic, behavioral and biochemical analyses.
"You can't just take and accept as an immutable truth that if the drug gave a positive result on fish, then the human body will react the same way. It is necessary to make a large number of experiments and use a number of test systems that will be able to prove that the danio rerio is a translational organism that allows in this situation to project the obtained research on the human body, - says the head of the study, a leading researcher at the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biology and Neurobiology of MIPT and Professor of St. Petersburg State University Allan Kaluev. "This paper shows that it is possible to put danio rerio into a state of prolonged chronic unpredictable stress, which is confirmed by all known methods of evidence–based and molecular biology, which means that fish of this species are susceptible to it, and their behavior is similar to symptoms in higher species."
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