Zebrafish as a Model in Human Disease 3.0

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is the continuation of our previous Special Issue, “Zebrafish as a Model in Human Disease 2.0”. We welcome original investigations as well as concise review manuscripts focusing on the application of the zebrafish organism to model disease and provide new insight into disease mechanisms and therapy. Understanding and fighting diseases require the right tools. Some aspects of disease biology and treatment, such as tissue homeostasis, interactions between cells and their microenvironment, and response to drugs, cannot be fully captured in vitro. The zebrafish continues to fascinate the research community and represents an ideal model for the in vivo study given its transparency, high manipulability, versatility and availability of a range of genetic tools (mutant, transgenic lines and biosensors), enabling researchers to answer key biological questions at a whole-organism level. In addition to classical approaches, recent technological advances for zebrafish disease modeling have been in precision genome editing. CRISPR-Cas9 has enabled the efficient generation of genetic mutations in zebrafish, and in particular, this can be used to generate site-specific or tissue-specific mutations. The current successes in this area make it even more exciting to look forward to new disease models and tools to investigate them, resulting in more robust, representative and predictive preclinical models.

This Special Issue seeks to attract either basic studies of human genetic diseases in zebrafish, as well as studies describing new methods and tools for genome editing to investigate these models and studies for large-scale drug screening that will guide new avenues for therapeutics development.

Dr. Andrea Vettori
Dr. Nicola Facchinello
Dr. Marco G. Schiavone
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• zebrafish
• CRISPR/Cas9
• transgenic lines
• biosensors
• endothelial cells
• extracellular matrix
• genetic mutant for human disease modeling
• xenografts