Zebrafish: A Predictive Model for Assessing Developmental Toxicity and Teratotoxicity of Compounds

摘要

Conventional assessment of developmental toxicity and teratotoxicity in mammalian models is laborious and time consuming. Zebrafish is emerging as an alternative vertebrate animal model for assessing toxicity and safty of compounds,in part due to its transpatency,rapid development,and simplicity of compound delivery. In this study,we characterized developmental toxicity and teratotoxicity of 7 known mammalian teratogenic compounds and 3 mammalian nonteratogenic compounds in zebrafish. A 100% correlation between developmental toxicity and teratotoxicity observed in zebrafish and findings in mammalian models was found. Our data suggest that zebrafish is a simple,reproducible,cost-efficient and highly predictive animal model for assessing compound-induced developmental toxicity and teratotoxicity.