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About Zebrafish: Zebrafish are simple, rapidly developing freshwater animals amenable to detailed genetic and developmental analyses. They share many developmental features with other vertebrates and thus are an excellent model for vertebrate development. By combining zebrafish studies with those in other animals, we will begin to understand the complex events that occur as an embryo develops from a one-celled zygote to a complex, multicellular organism, as well as what goes awry when disease or cancer strikes. Zebrafish embryos are transparent and develop outside the mother, allowing early developmental events, even those as spectacular and complex as brain morphogenesis, organ formation, and axon outgrowth, to be observed through the microscope in the living embryo. Over and over, this attribute has been combined with powerful imaging techniques and genetic screens, and a large number of genes involved in normal development and disease models have been generated. In addition, the zebrafish genome is being sequenced, and a large number of genetic, genomic, and expression databases are available through the premier zebrafish electronic resource ZFIN, the Zebrafish Information Network.  Mesodermal segments in zebrafish form every 30 minutes. |  Upper panel shows wild-type embryo with segmental boundaries highlighted in blue. Lower panel shows an embryo deficient for her1 and her7 genes, with strong boundaries highlighted in blue and weak boundaries highlighted in red. |
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Organisms 
