Zebrafish as a tool in Alzheimer's disease research

Alzheimer's disease is the most prevalent form of neurodegenerative disease. Despite many years of intensive research our understanding of the molecular events leading to this pathology is far from complete. No effective treatments have been defined and questions surround the validity and utility of existing animal models. The zebrafish (and, in particular, its embryos) is a malleable and accessible model possessing a vertebrate neural structure and genome. Zebrafish genes orthologous to those mutated in human familial Alzheimer's disease have been defined. Work in zebrafish has permitted discovery of unique characteristics of these genes that would have been difficult to observe with other models. In this brief review we give an overview of Alzheimer's disease and transgenic animal models before examining the current contribution of zebrafish to this research area. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled Zebrafish Models of Neurological Diseases.

Research Highlights
► The molecular pathology of Alzheimer's disease is still poorly understood.
► Zebrafish possess orthologues of human genes involved in familial and sporadic Alzheimer's disease.
► Zebrafish embryos are a powerful tool for molecular biological analyses of Alzheimer's disease molecular pathology.