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Modelling cardiovascular and metabolic disease using transgenic zebrafish

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies identified hundreds of loci that are associated with cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors. For most loci the causal genes remain unknown. My group developed experimental pipelines that facilitate image-based genetic screens in zebrafish larvae by using: 1) the zebrafish’ well-annotated genome; 2) CRISPR-Cas9 based mutagenesis; 3) fluorescent transgenes and dyes; 4) automated positioning and imaging technologies; 5) custom-written image quantification pipelines. Results from dietary, drug and genetic screens confirm that zebrafish larvae represent an opportunity to identify causal genes for cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors, and increase our understanding of disease aetiology.

About Dr den Hoed

Marcel den Hoed completed his PhD on genetic and physiological aspects of physical activity and food intake regulation at Maastricht University (Netherlands) in 2009. He was then awarded a three-year Career Development Fellowship at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, where he initiated and coordinated genome-wide association studies for heart rate and physical activity, supervised by Ruth Loos. In 2012 he started a second post-doc at the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), before initiating his own group at Uppsala University (Sweden) in 2013. His current research aims to translate GWAS findings into clinically relevant results using high-throughput genes in live transgenic zebrafish model systems.

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