Zebrafish models of cancer: progress and future challenges

Abstract

The need for scalable strategies to probe the biological consequences of candidate cancer genes has never been more pressing. The zebrafish, with its capacity for high-throughput transgenesis, in vivo imaging and chemical/genetic screening, has ideal features for undertaking this task. Unique biological insights from zebrafish have already led to the identification of novel oncogenic drivers and small molecules being used to treat the human cancer. This review summarizes the recent main findings and describes pertinent areas where the zebrafish can greatly contribute to our understanding of cancer biology and treatment.

Figure 1

Important areas of zebrafish application in cancer research. (a) Multigenic screening involves the parallel testing of the oncogenic potential of candidate cancer genes by injecting plasmids harboring gene of interests into embryos and monitoring for accelerated tumor onset in adult fish [28^••]. (b) Chemical libraries can be screened for activity in live zebrafish embryos using early embryonic phenotypic markers in 96 well plates. (c) Tumor metastasis can be followed through the injection of GFP-labelled cell cultures in transparent zebrafish, called casper [17]. (d) One method of studying cancer epigenetics in fish is to perform chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) upon FACs sorted embryos followed by sequencing or expression profiling. Embryos can be rapidly collected in tens of thousands of batches using the i-spawn [55].