LAUSR

Zebrafish are an attractive vertebrate model organism for biomedical discovery (Tavares and Santos Lopes, 2013). The advantages of using zebrafish are well known and include cost-effectiveness, high fecundity, short generation time, external development, transparency of embryonic stages, and ease of genome manipulation. These features have provided investigators with a vertebrate model with unprecedented potential for the live imaging of biological processes (Okuda and Hogan, 2020) and genetic and drug screenings (Shah et al., 2015; Lam and Peterson, 2019). Zebrafish models have been used in developmental biology and embryogenesis (Briggs, 2002; Mathavan et al., 2005). They have been increasingly used to investigate human diseases in the last 2 decades due to the high degree of genetic, anatomical, and physiological similarities to humans (Dooley and Zon, 2000; Adamson et al., 2018). Over 80% of disease-causing human proteins have an orthologue in zebrafish, and the publishing of the zebrafish reference genome in 2013 accelerated disease modelling in this organism. Consequently, our understanding of disease mechanisms and the development of new medical treatments have expanded. Notably, new therapeutic targets and molecules have been identified using zebrafish, which are now being considered for human trials or are awaiting clinical applications. Nevertheless, more zebrafish models are needed to broaden our understanding of human diseases. The current research topic in Frontiers of Cell and Developmental Biology includes 35 original and review articles from 224 authors, containing a wide range of examples on how zebrafish contribute as an animal model to our understanding of various human diseases. The collection encompasses different areas of investigation: as further detailed by the sections below.