Liver is one of the largest internal organs in the body and its importance for metabolism, detoxification and homeostasis has been well established. In this review, we summarized recent progresses in studying liver initiation and development during embryogenesis using zebrafish as a model system. We mainly focused on topics related to the specification of hepatoblasts from endoderm, the formati...

Using zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a case study, we show that the maturity concept of Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory is a useful metric for developmental state. Maturity does not depend on food or temperature contrary to age and to some extent length. We compile the maturity levels for each developmental milestone recorded in staging atlases. The analysis of feeding, growth, reproduction and ...

Laboratories around the world have produced tens of thousands of mutant and transgenic zebrafish lines. As with mice, maintaining all of these valuable zebrafish genotypes is expensive, risky, and beyond the capacity of even the largest stock centers. Because reducing oxidative stress has become an important aspect of reducing the variability in mouse sperm cryopreservation, we examined whether...

Most organisms modulate their reproductive activity responding to day length by the nocturnal release of melatonin by the pineal gland. This hormone is also responsible for synchronizing reproduction with specific external environment stimuli in order to optimize reproductive success.The aim of this study was to establish the effect of melatonin on zebrafish reproduction.Adult females were dail...

Discrimination of quantity (magnitude) was investigated in zebrafish (Danio rerio). Male zebrafish chose to approach the location previously occupied by the larger in number between 2 groups of female conspecifics (no longer visible at test) in sets of 1 versus 2 items, and 2 versus 3 items, but failed at 3 versus 4 items; similarly, when tested with larger numbers, zebrafish succeeded with 2 v...

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) has been considered as an increasingly popular model organism for biomedical research since 1980s. Due to highly conserved nature of both genetics and cell biology as higher vertebrates, Zebrafish is a suitable animal model in screening leading compounds and identifying drug targets. Small body size, ease of care, rapid development, and transparency of the Zebrafish embr...

To help investigate the evolutionary origin of the imprinting (parent-of-origin mono-allelic expression) of paternal genes observed in mammals, we constructed haploid and diploid androgenetic zebrafish (Danio r h o ) . Haploid androgenotes were produced by fertilizing eggs that had been X-ray irradiated to eliminate the maternal genome. Subsequent inhibition f the first mitotic division of hapl...