Zebrafish: The Complete Cardiovascular Compendium
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The genetic screen provides a powerful pyramid of biological insight. As shown in Figure 1, at the pinnacle isthe opportunity to understand the essential logic of a developmental system, obtained during the initial phenotypic analysis. What are the essential and interpretabledecisions? There had been a sense, prior to the work inthe zebrafish, that organ development occurred too late tobe clearly dissected through a screen; that the mutationsthat affected heart development would be too pleiotropic,and hence uninformative. Fortunately, it turned out thatthe screens have been as successful in revealing unexpected steps to organogenesis as about any developmental processes (Fishman and Olson 1997). The next layer,as shown in Figure 1, the cloning of mutated genes, required the establishment of a genomic infrastructure forzebrafish. Now generated, this too has provided novel insights to new genes or families of genes (Fishman 2001).In some cases, these genes already have been used as entrance points to pathways such as gridlock, which, embedded in a Notch pathway, culminates in generation ofthe arterial cell fate (Zhong et al. 2000, 2001). One of th...
