The absence of telomerase leads to immune response and tumor regression in zebrafish melanoma.

Most cancers re-activate telomerase to maintain telomere length and thus acquire immortality. Activating telomerase promoter mutations are found in many cancers, including melanoma. However, it is unclear when and if telomerase is strictly required during tumorigenesis.

Gut-specific telomerase expression counteracts systemic aging in telomerase-deficient zebrafish.

Telomere shortening is a hallmark of aging and is counteracted by telomerase. As in humans, the zebrafish gut is one of the organs with the fastest rate of telomere decline, triggering early tissue dysfunction during normal zebrafish aging and in prematurely aged telomerase mutants. However, whether telomere-dependent aging of an individual organ, the gut, causes systemic aging is unknown.

Zebrafish Xenotransplantation Models for Studying Gene Function and Drug Treatment in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.

Introduction: Zebrafish is a promising model organism for human disease including hepatocellular cancer (HCC). Recently, zebrafish has emerged also as a host for xenograft studies of liver cancer cell lines and patient derived tumors of HCC. Zebrafish embryos enable drug screening and gene function studies of xenografted cells via ease of microinjection and visualization of tumor growth and metastasis.

ZenoFishDb v1.1: A Database for Xenotransplantation Studies in Zebrafish.

Rapidly accumulating literature has proven feasibility of the zebrafish xenograft models in cancer research. Nevertheless, online databases for searching the current zebrafish xenograft literature are in great demand. Herein, we have developed a manually curated database, called ZenoFishDb v1.

Development of a novel zebrafish xenograft model in ache mutants using liver cancer cell lines.

Acetylcholinesterase (AChE), an enzyme responsible for degradation of acetylcholine, has been identified as a prognostic marker in liver cancer. Although in vivo Ache tumorigenicity assays in mouse are present, no established liver cancer xenograft model in zebrafish using an ache mutant background exists. Herein, we developed an embryonic zebrafish xenograft model using epithelial (Hep3B) and mesenchymal (SKHep1) liver cancer cell lines in wild-type and ache sibling mutant larvae after characterization of cholinesterase expression and activity in cell lines and zebrafish larvae.