Larval Zebrafish In Vivo Model To Study Gut Motility Disorders

The goal of this research is to establish zebrafish as a model organism to study intestinal motility diseases in humans to aid in the understanding of the pathophysiology of such diseases. The study of exactly how and why the human intestine develops certain gut motility disorders needs to be more carefully investigated to develop medicinal or surgical cures for gut motility disorders. First, I was able to identify several zebrafish candidate genes from the literature that are of interest, and determined how conserved they are using multi-sequence alignments to compare DNA sequences with humans, mice, and zebrafish. Second, I performed a feeding behavior study to determine the age at which zebrafish larvae are mature enough to capture brine shrimp. The results show day 9 post-fertilization to be the best and most efficient day a zebrafish larvae captures brine shrimp as a meal. The results of this study aided in developing a gut transit assay which is a way to quantify the passage time of food and waste from feeding to clearing in a zebrafish larvae. Using this information, diseases like Hirschsprung's disease and irritable bowel syndrome could be further investigated in greater details.