Zebrafish phenomics: behavioral screens and phenotyping of mutagenized fish

- Zebrafish behavioral phenotyping tools are becoming increasingly available.
- The diurnal nature of zebrafish allows the use of efficient visual stimuli.
- Both stimulus delivery and behavioral response quantification are automatable.
- Even lengthy and complex learning tasks, when automated, can run in parallel.
- High throughput behavioral screening is becoming a reality for zebrafish.

The zebrafish is small, easy to keep, and breeds in large quantities, features that make it attractive for high throughput mutagenesis screening. It is translationally relevant due to evolutionary conservation of several of its characteristics, but particularly because of the high nucleotide sequence homology between zebrafish and human genes. Behavioral genetics also noticed this species. Although still very small, the number of behavioral paradigms designed for zebrafish is exponentially increasing and the marriage between behavioral sciences and genetics is becoming a reality for zebrafish. This paper reviews the latest developments of this rapidly expanding field with illustrative examples on novel behavioral paradigms drawn from the work of the author's laboratory along with a short discussion on modern forward genetic methods.