November 15, 2012 Courtesy of Matt Solovey

By Michael Martin Garrett

Researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine at Hershey Medical Center have recently completed a study that found that zebrafish can be used to test the effects of genetic mutations in humans.

[Zebrafish] genes are similar enough that if [someone] mutates the genes or knocks them down, what will happen is very similar to what will happen in humans, said lead researcher Dr. Keith Cheng.

In the future, the process and results of the study may be used to test the functions of genetic mutations, Cheng said.

This kind of research, being able to functionally test human mutations in a living model organism, can lend much support to the developing field of personalized medicine, Steven Wentzel , a Penn State graduate student and researcher on the study, wrote in an email.

Wentzel wrote that many scientific studies have identified numerous genes that are linked to various diseases, but by being able to test individual genetic mutations we can gain insight into what roles they may play in human disease, allowing us to prioritize treatment targets.

Cheng said there are many different combinations of mutations, and these mutations can be very small, with the difference of only a single amino acid between two versions of the same gene.

Everybody knows that were going to be carrying our DNA sequence around in our iPhones soon, but were not going to know what all of our mutations mean, Cheng said.

According to the abstract of the study, the approach may be extended to other model systems and could contribute to the understanding of the relationships between DNA sequence variation, human biology and disease.

See more here:
Penn state researchers study genetic mutations in Zebrafish

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