Abstract
Zebrafish (Danio rerio) emerged as a leading model in designing diverse mammalian diseases. It shares high resemblance in genotypic modalities with human. Despite difference in structural aspects, functionality of human liver is considerably consistent with that of zebrafish. It elicits comparable signalling cascade post chemical insult to liver and is highly conserved in genetic makeup with human. External fertilization, transparent embryo-larva and rapid ontogenic process make it suitable to study developmental defects in liver of zebrafish and its various regulatory pathways. Zebrafish model is now gaining popularity over rodent models in drug screening and basic research due to the advantage of smaller size, ease of handling, low cost of maintenance, relatively less ethical issues and increasing understanding of its genome. This chapter discusses about the history of zebrafish research in liver diseases, a comparative account of structural similarity and differences of human and zebrafish liver and possibilities of designing diverse liver pathological conditions in zebrafish. The liver pathogenesis due to various chemicals, polycystic conditions, genetic mutations, gene transfer and cancers have been discussed. The advantages, limitations and future prospects of zebrafish in liver disease modelling are also discussed.
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Maru, R., Kumar, D., Bansal, K.K., Gagarani, M.B., Bhattacharya, S., Maru, S. (2022). Zebrafish Models for Liver Diseases. In: Bhandari, P.R., Bharani, K.K., Khurana, A. (eds) Zebrafish Model for Biomedical Research . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5217-2_20
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