Zebrafish Congenital Heart Disease Models

Heart development is a dynamic process regulated by spatial and temporal cues that are integrated to influence molecular, cellular, and tissue-level events that shape the adult heart. Disruption of these highly coordinated events can have devastating effects on cardiac form and function. Abnormal development of the heart can lead to congenital heart defects (CHD), which affect babies every year.

Due to similarities in cardiac morphogenesis, the zebrafish has emerged as an ideal vertebrate system for studying cardiac development and can be used to understand cardiac development and mechanisms associated with coronary heart disease. Because of its genetic tractability, external fertilization, early optical clarity, and The ability to survive without a functional cardiovascular system during development. In particular, recent advances in imaging techniques and the creation of zebrafish transgenes now allow in vivo analysis of dynamic cellular events that occur during cardiac morphogenesis. The combination of these striking features thus provides detailed insights into how specific genes affect cardiac development at the cellular level.

Fig.1 Developmental stages of the zebrafish heart.

Our Zebrafish Congenital Heart Disease Models

With years of expertise in using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology in zebrafish, Creative Biogene offers a variety of transgenic zebrafish models of congenital heart disease. We used a combination of morpholino knockout studies and RNA expression of human genes harboring potentially deleterious sequence variants (PDSVs) to confirm causality. In addition, we examined gene dose effects by titrating the amount of morpholine or RNA injected into zebrafish. Therefore, our zebrafish can be used to confirm and model human PDSV that causes CHD. We are dedicated to helping you understand the cellular and molecular pathways that regulate cardiac function through zebrafish models to inform therapeutic approaches to treat coronary heart disease.

Advantages

• Non-invasive visualization of in vivo organs and biological processes at high resolution
• Visualization of Pathogenesis
• Examine multiple functions of genes in different mutants
• High-throughput genetic and drug screening

Creative Biogene is committed to providing you with excellent tools to study the mechanisms of congenital heart disease, helping you understand the cellular and molecular pathways that regulate heart function. If you would like to learn more about zebrafish models, please feel free to contact us.

References

1. Grant MG, et al. Modeling Syndromic Congenital Heart Defects in Zebrafish. Curr Top Dev Biol. 2017, 124:1-40.
2. Tu S, Chi NC. Zebrafish models in cardiac development and congenital heart birth defects. Differentiation. 2012, 84(1):4-16.
3. Giardoglou P, Beis D. On Zebrafish Disease Models and Matters of the Heart. Biomedicines. 2019, 7(1):15.
4. Bowley G, et al. Zebrafish as a tractable model of human cardiovascular disease. Br J Pharmacol. 2022, 179(5):900-917.

For research use only. Not intended for any clinical use.