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Dr. Alan Guttmacher: We seek to ensure that all people are born
healthy and that they live optimal lives,
that they remain healthy.
Brant Weinstein: We study how blood vessels form,
what makes them develop.
Harry Burgess: ...to understanding better how the
brain stem normally contributes to behavior will allow
us to ask questions about where to look.
Lorette Javois: The biggest advance over the last decade is
not only in what we know about the genomes of the different
organisms, but the ways in which we can manipulate those genomes.
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Dr. Alan Guttmacher: Zebrafish have a real advantage compared
to humans or mice or many mammals in that the
development happens so quickly.
Development that in a human might take weeks or even months
to occur, occurs in zebrafish over just a couple of days.
So everything is speeded up.
And we can watch things in real time much more easily.
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Dr. Alan Guttmacher: And the wonderful thing about fish is,
in terms of studying development, is it of course,
fish deposit their eggs in the water.
And therefore when the eggs are fertilized,
embryonic and fetal development occurs not inside
the mother where it's hard to see.
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Brant Weinstein: You can see every organ.
You can see the entire brain, the guts,
anything that you can imagine.
You can just simply look through a microscope and see all
of this really exquisite detail.
And being able to do that means that you can very easily just
take a fish or hundreds of fish or a thousand of fish and look
through them and try to find the ones that have a particular
sort of defect you're looking for.
And by uncovering these same defects in fish we can then
do experimental studies on them which
are not possible to do in humans.
Similarly you can also do large scale chemical screenings.
And this is a way to basically uncover small molecules or
compounds, essentially, possible future drugs that can be used
to have particular beneficial effects such as stopping blood
vessels from growing, or promoting blood vessel growth.
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Harry burgess: And so in newborn humans it's really all about
the brain stem with these kind of hard wired mechanisms for
allowing babies to control their behavior-- their simple
behaviors-- in the appropriate fashion.
So the same is true in zebrafish,
zebrafish have a very sophisticated brain stem.
And so we can use the zebrafish to explore what kinds of
behaviors can be controlled by the brain stem.
This is the sort of project with a big up front investment
in making all of these fish.
But I think once we have the fish it goes pretty quickly,
I think.
So I hope in a year we'll really be able to demonstrate that
using these fish can give us very unique insights into the
way that the brain controls behavior.
Lorette Javois: So we have an effort here at NIH across the
whole of the NIH to coordinate our funding efforts
for research in this area,
a Trans-NIH Zebrafish Coordinating Committee.
Lorette Javois: There's been a very concerted effort over
the last decade to develop these tools to further the research
and NIH across institutes has worked very strongly in this
area to move it forward.
This community, the zebrafish research community, has perhaps
been one of the better communities at interacting
with NIH staff to help coordinate this effort.
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Dr. Alan Guttmacher: To answer the 'all' questions that are the
most challenging and the most important ones in science today
requires a facility of this size with these many fish available
to really excellent scientists.
It's an incredible resource.