Fishing for a mechanism: using zebrafish to understand spinal muscular atrophy.

Fishing for causes and cures of motor neuron disorders

Motor neuron disorders (MNDs) are a clinically heterogeneous group of neurological diseases characterized by progressive degeneration of motor neurons, and share some common pathological pathways. Despite remarkable advances in our understanding of these diseases, no curative treatment for MNDs exists. To better understand the pathogenesis of MNDs and to help develop new treatments, the establi...

Assessment of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) for Childhood-onset Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) Using Duplex Fluorescent PCR

Drawing Word co-occurrence map of Spinal Muscular Atrophy disease

Introduction:  The purpose of this article is to evaluate the status of articles in the field of Spinal Muscular Atrophy According to the Scientometrics indices Word co-occurrence map of this field . Methods: The present study is an applied one with a quantitative approach and a descriptive approach. It has been done using scientometrics and the co-occurrence words analysis technique. Document...

Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Short Review Article

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a genetic disorder which affect nervous system and is characterized with progressive distal motor neuron weakness. The survival motor neuron (SMN) protein level reduces in patients with SMA. Two different genes code survival motor neuron protein in human genome. Skeletal and intercostal muscles denervation lead to weakness, hypotony, hyporeflexia, respiratory fa...

Effective heritable gene knockdown in zebrafish using synthetic microRNAs

Although zebrafish is used to model human diseases through mutational and morpholino-based knockdown approaches, there are currently no robust transgenic knockdown tools. Here we investigate the knockdown efficiency of three synthetic miRNA-expressing backbones and show that these constructs can downregulate a sensor transgene with different degrees of potency. Using this approach, we reproduce...