2-Alexander Schier and his colleagues at Harvard developed an automated system to assess 60,000 distinct sleep related behaviors in zebrafish. After Screening 5,600 small molecules on the larvae, the team discovered 463 significant sleep altering compounds, many of which have been known to have similar effects in humans.
3- "This was a proof of principle that many of the pathways found in humans are conserved in fish." It's still unclear what molecular mechanisms control sleep and wakefulness. Sleep drugs generate $7 billion in annual profits in the US. However the drug development process is tedious and expensive. Schier believes that testing drug candidates in Zebrafish could be a cheap and straightforward alternative to conventional drug screeing.
4-"The advantage of Zebrafish is that you can keep large numbers of animals in very small space and raise many animals relatively cheaply" says Schier. Unlike files and worms, which are often used in the early stages of pharmaceutical research, fish are vertebrates. " Much can be found in zebrafish that is relevant to mammals, " he says.
5-To screen the drugs, researchers pipetted single Zebrafish larvae into a tiny well of a 96 well tray. Each well was injected with a drug, with one drug tested on 10 different larvae. They placed the tray in a recording chamber with infrared and white LED lights and a camera connected to computer software. After lining the tray up with a corresponding grid on the computer screen, researchers programmed the timing of light to simulate day and night. The camera recorded each fish's activity over two days and video tracking software plotted out each fish's movements per seconds.
From:- MIT Technology Review
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