BarnOwl wrote:Apples wrote:
Damn ... Little Paul's "I coulda been a contender" complex is fierce. "I was into zebrafish before zebrafish were cool." Yeah, Puny Paul, and too bad you were too lazy/incompetent to stick with it until they became cool. Pitiful fucking little man should shut the fuck up about it - it's embarrassing.
Zebrafish might be great for some kinds of research, but as preclinical models for human cancers ... not so much. The mouse doesn't always provide a perfect model either, but there are many examples of mouse knockout, transgenic, and xenograft tumor models that are used extensively in preclinical testing and therapeutic development.
A Very Famous Scientist (and Nobel laureate), who had started working on zebrafish, gave a talk at a meeting years ago, in which she boasted and boasted about how fucking wonderful zebrafish were and how they were going to take over developmental biology research completely. Another Famous Scientist, well-known for her research on mouse development, spoke up and systemically ripped the VFS a new one, pointing out some of the many examples for which genes and concepts had been identified first in the mouse, and were then confirmed (some might say
copycatted) in zebrafish. There were rage tears, as I recall.
So, it's new grant time. WIfe has been having trouble coming up with 'ideas' (as in a major, anxiety provoking way). Won't be fired, but money will be short and salary could reduced in a fairly major way. This is one of the downsides of science -- no grant, no big salary...
Which is similar to many career fields, really. There just comes a point in time where you're done for whatever reason -- age, out-of-step, no-more-ideas, whatever, you're no longer a 'rain maker' and the compensation is reduced (or even eliminated).
Anyway, right now she's got a couple of significant aims (or specific aims or whatever they're called, I don't pay that much attention to the terminology) going through the department review process before being made ready for a 'certified budget.' One of the things she rejected, before she submitted those two aims was recapitulating (in Zebrafish) some mouse work.
She was all like 'that's bullshit.' I was like, I don't care. Get the money. If the NIH will fund that kind of research, take it.
Anyway, after the eye-rolling at my pragmatic suggestion, she's submitting stuff on microtubules and how mutations can affect neurological development. This little wikipedia excerpt might give you some idea of what she's looking at and why:
Several rare neurodegenerative diseases are linked to genetic mutations in the motor proteins, kinesin and dynein, and in those cases it is likely that axonal transport is a key player in mediating pathology. Dysfunctional axonal transport is also linked to sporadic (common) forms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.[8] This is mainly due to numerous observations that large axonal accumulations are invariably seen in affected neurons, and that genes known to play a role in the familial forms of these diseases also have purported roles in normal axonal transport. However there is little direct evidence for involvement of axonal transport in the latter diseases, and other mechanisms (such as direct synaptotoxicity) may be more relevant.
Since the axon depends on axoplasmic transport for vital proteins and materials, injury such as diffuse axonal injury that interrupts the transport will cause the distal axon to degenerate in a process called Wallerian degeneration. Cancer drugs that interfere with cancerous growth by altering microtubules (which are necessary for cell division) damage nerves because the microtubules are necessary for axonal transport.[1]
But, yeah, lots of that early Zebrafish work was just low-hanging fruit where they took results from other animal models and re-did the work in Zebrafish. And there's (likely) a lot of that still going on.
