Zebrafish LPS-Induced Inflammation Models

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), an endotoxin in the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria, induces innate immune responses after being recognized by toll-like receptors. LPS can directly or indirectly trigger a variety of pathophysiological processes in vivo, such as metabolic changes, fever, multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, endotoxic shock, and death in extreme cases. At present, many experimental methods and animal models have been established to determine the various biological effects mediated by LPS on the host. Among them, mammals are well suited to mimic endotoxins. However, different animal species have different susceptibility to LPS, eg rabbits and horses are the most sensitive, while rats and mice are the least sensitive.

Recently, zebrafish has been used as a model for human disease due to its unique advantages in biology, genomics, and genetics, as well as its high conservation of disease-related signaling pathways. Notably, studies have shown that responses similar to those observed in mammals can be observed in zebrafish, and that transcription factors and signaling pathways are highly conserved between zebrafish and mammals in response to LPS stimulation. Therefore, in recent years, zebrafish has been established as an ideal model for the pathophysiology and high-throughput in vivo screening of human inflammation-related diseases.

Fig1. The induction of LPS on inflammation phenotype in zebrafish.

Our Zebrafish LPS-Induced Inflammation Models

Creative Biogene non-invasively immerses zebrafish embryos in LPS-containing medium or injected into the yolk to establish LPS-induced zebrafish inflammation. In the successfully injected zebrafish model, macrophages and neutrophils rapidly and abundantly migrate to the LPS injection site, accompanied by upregulation of IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α expression. Characteristic signs of endotoxin inflammation, including phagocytic cell migration, yolk necrosis, and 24-hour hemorrhagic pericardium, were also observed when LPS was injected into the yolk. During this procedure, we visualized the migration of phagocytes using simple staining in zebrafish or transgenic lines, and measured expression levels of key cytokines involved in the inflammatory response using quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), including IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α, and finally larval mortality was used as the primary endpoint. Our zebrafish LPS-induced inflammation models can be used to study inflammation-mediated diseases, as well as to screen and validate in vivo many compounds that can alter sepsis pathology.

Our Advantages

• Greatly simplifies the analysis of the blood system
• Convenient and rapid assessment of the anti-inflammatory properties of drugs
• Rapid analysis of sepsis-related pathological and cellular processes in whole organisms

If you want to know more about zebrafish models, please feel free to contact us.

References

1. Yang LL, et al. Endotoxin molecule lipopolysaccharide-induced zebrafish inflammation model: a novel screening method for anti-inflammatory drugs. Molecules. 2014, 19(2):2390-2409.
2. Philip AM, et al. Development of a zebrafish sepsis model for high-throughput drug discovery. Mol Med. 2017, 23:134-148.
3. Xie Y, et al. Modeling Inflammation in Zebrafish for the Development of Anti-inflammatory Drugs. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2021, 8:620984.

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