Studying the immune response to human viral infections using zebrafish

Abstract

Humans and viruses have a long co-evolutionary history. Viral illnesses have and will continue to shape human history: from smallpox, to influenza, to HIV, and beyond. Animal models of human viral illnesses are needed in order to generate safe and effective antiviral medicines, adjuvant therapies, and vaccines. These animal models must support the replication of human viruses, recapitulate aspects of human viral illnesses, and respond with conserved immune signaling cascades. The zebrafish is perhaps the simplest, most commonly used laboratory model organism in which innate and/or adaptive immunity can be studied. Herein, we will discuss the current zebrafish models of human viral illnesses and the insights they have provided. We will highlight advantages of early life stage zebrafish and the importance of innate immunity in human viral illnesses. We will also discuss viral characteristics to consider before infecting zebrafish with human viruses as well as predict other human viruses that may be able to infect zebrafish.

Establishment of a cell line with high transfection efficiency from zebrafish Danio rerio embryos and its susceptibility to fish viruses

“…To isolate GCRV and investigate the molecular mechanisms of GCRV pathogenesis, a few of cell lines susceptible to GCRV were developed from different fish, including C. idella kidney cell line and Ussuri catfish skin (UCS) cell line (Ou et al, 2014). So far, several fish cell lines susceptible to SGIV had been also developed, including Epinephelus lanceolatus (Bloch 1790) snout cell line, Epinephelus akaara (Temminck & Schlegel 1842) brain, liver and kidney cell lines (Ou-Yang et al, 2010;Gong et al, 2011;Huang et al, 2014). Although some commercial fish cell lines had been used to study the molecular characterization and infection mechanisms of fish viruses, many studies were restricted by their unknown genome sequences.…”

“…Zebrafish Danio rerio (Hamilton 1822) is an important model fish for study of immunology and virology due to its small size, short life history, high fecundity, transparent embryo and full annotation of genome (Sullivan & Kim, ; Bakkers, ; Kalueff et al ., ). Danio rerio is not only a good model for human infectious diseases (Goody et al ., ), it has been also reported to be the natural host of many fish viruses, such as infectious haematopoietic necrosis virus, infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (LaPatra et al ., ), infectious spleen and kidney necrosis virus (Xu et al ., ), nervous necrosis virus (NNV) (Lu et al ., ) and spring viremia of carp virus (SVCV) (Wang et al ., ). Phelan et al .…”

Alternative haplotypes of antigen processing genes in zebrafish diverged early in vertebrate evolution

“…Zebrafish excel as a model to uncover gene function (59,60) and are now advancing research in many fields, including stem cell biology (61,62), cancer (63,64), infectious disease (65,66), and autoimmune disease studies (67,68). In this context, we consider the identification of expressed genes in our zebrafish MHC assembly to be noteworthy.…”

Structure and evolutionary history of a large family of NLR proteins in the zebrafish

“…The zebrafish has become a widely used model system for the study of disease and immunity (Rowe et al 2014;Goody et al 2014), and a good understanding of its immune repertoire is necessary for the interpretation of experimental results, for example in genetic screens or in drug screens. In a previous study we discovered more than 200 NLR-protein encoding genes (Stein et al 2007).…”