The advantages and disadvantages of using zebrafish for validation of GWAS loci from DILI studies

AdvantagesDisadvantages
  • Ease of application of drugs dissolved in the embryonic media in embryos and early larvae

  • Ease of liver imaging in intact organism

  • Differences in the liver architecture between zebrafish and humans may alter pathogenesis of DILI species-specifically

  • Ability to screen a high number of biological replicates using a wide range of doses

  • Most GWAS loci are non-coding and may not be well conserved between species

  • Availability of various mutant strains of GWAS loci as ready-to-use models

  • Speedy generation of knockout and transgenic strains

  • Difficulty in functional assessment of knock-out and knock-in strains because of the presence of paralogous copies of genes in zebrafish (one-to-many genes)

  • Presence of many GWAS human loci with orthologs in the zebrafish genome

  • Not all human GWAS loci have orthologs in zebrafish

  • Observed similarity between humans and zebrafish in their pathogenic response to drugs

  • Varying levels of sequence similarity between protein coding genes of zebrafish and humans

  • Potential for generating specialized zebrafish cohorts for eQTL studies

  • Requirement of a large collection of strains/individuals for idiosyncratic DILI studies in zebrafish