Abstract
High-throughput, whole-organism phenotypic drug screening is made possible using live zebrafish larvae. Many human drugs have now been shown to affect zebrafish larvae in similar ways, through homologous molecular mechanisms. At this stage in life, zebrafish are small enough to fit in multi-well, microliter plates, yet developed enough to exhibit complex phenotypes, such as hunting behaviors and avoidance of predators. Importantly, zebrafish larvae can be easily dosed via automated pipetting of chemical compounds directly into their liquid medium, without injection. Only microgram amounts of small molecules are required, making animal husbandry and dosing regimens cost effective. This chapter describes how the stereotyped zebrafish larval responses to darkness and strobe light—which cause hyperactivity and freezing behavior, respectively—can be used to efficiently screen small molecules for brain and behavior-modulating activity.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Swinney DC, Anthony J (2011) How were new medicines discovered? Nat Rev Drug Discov 10:507–519
Rennekamp AJ, Peterson RT (2015) 15 years of zebrafish chemical screening. Curr Opin Chem Biol 24:58–70
Rennekamp AJ, Huang XP, Wang Y, Patel S, Lorello PJ, Cade L et al (2016) Sigma1 receptor ligands control a switch between passive and active threat responses. Nat Chem Biol 12:552–558
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Rennekamp, A.J. (2018). Modulation of Threat Response in Larval Zebrafish. In: Wagner, B. (eds) Phenotypic Screening. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1787. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7847-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7847-2_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-7846-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-7847-2
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols