Abstract
Functional chemicals are very useful tools for molecular biology studies. Due to its small size, large progeny clutch, and embryonic transparency, zebrafish serves as a superb in vivo animal model for chemical compound screens and characterization. During zebrafish embryogenesis, multiple developmental phenotypes can be easily examined under the microscope, therefore allowing a more comprehensive evaluation for identifying novel functional chemicals than cell-based assays. Ever since the first zebrafish-based chemical screen was conducted in the year 2000, many functional chemicals have been discovered using this strategy. In this chapter, we describe how to perform a typical zebrafish-based chemical screen and discuss the details of the protocol by using the example of the identification and characterization of two new Smo inhibitors with a Gli:GFP transgenic line.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge support from the 973 Program of MOST of P. R. China (2009CB941203) and Shenzhen Science and Technology Key Laboratory Promotion Fund. We thank Zahra Tehrani for reading and editing the manuscript.
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Zhong, H., Lin, S. (2011). Chemical Screening with Zebrafish Embryos. In: Satyanarayanajois, S. (eds) Drug Design and Discovery. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 716. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-012-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-61779-012-6_12
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