Zebrafish embryos as an alternative model for screening of drug-induced organ toxicity

Differential sensitivity in embryonic stages of the zebrafish (Danio rerio): The role of toxicokinetics for stage-specific susceptibility for azinphos-methyl lethal effects

“…Particularly, the embryos of the zebrafish (Danio rerio) represent a highly attractive and versatile model, given their ease of production, size, transparency, rapid development, as well as well characterized developmental genetics and suitability for high throughput analysis. Potential applications in toxicology range from the prediction of acute fish (Belanger et al, 2013a;Knöbel et al, 2012a;Lammer et al, 2009) and fish early life stage toxicity (Volz et al, 2011), determination of bioconcentration (Kuhnert et al, 2013), analyses of endocrine disruption (Brion et al, 2012;Thienpont et al, 2011), identification of organ toxicity (Scholz, 2013), and teratogenic effects (Brannen et al, 2010;Gustafson et al, 2012;Selderslaghs et al, 2012) to prediction of mammalian acute systemic toxicity (Ali et al, 2011). Most advanced is the prediction of acute fish toxicity ((Lammer et al, 2009); (Belanger et al, 2013b); (Knöbel et al, 2012b)) indicated also by the recently approved OECD guideline TG 236 for the Fish Embryo Acute Toxicity Test (Busquet et al, 2014).…”

Zebrafish Get Connected: Investigating Neurotransmission Targets and Alterations in Chemical Toxicity

“…The value of transcriptomic evaluations in zebrafish toxicology studies is well recognized, especially for environmental toxicology [12,203]. Next generation technologies such as RNA-seq are providing precise and powerful options for evaluating the transcriptome [203,204]. Please see the review by Wang et al [204] and Aanes et al [205] for information on RNA-seq and its application in zebrafish.…”

In vitro systems: current limitations and future perspectives

“…Goals of these studies are to improve differentiated functions by 3D cultivation conditions (Messner et al 2013;Schyschka et al 2013) to study metabolites (Sierra-Santoyo et al 2012;Watzek et al 2013;Abdelhamid et al 2013;Tolosa et al 2013) and drug transporters hepatocytes (Wassermann et al 2013). Moreover, zebrafish-based test systems have been studied as an alternative method to identify hepatotoxic compounds (Driessen et al 2013;Scholz 2013). Compared to the high number of studies based on in vitro systems the fraction of in vivo studies published in the Archives of Toxicology has become relatively small (Rossato et al 2013;Yu et al 2013;Early et al 2013;Cordova et al 2013;Saito et al 2013;Hammad et al 2014).…”