A National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) team has found that zebrafish could potentially be used in place of mice in drug addiction research, the institutes said on Monday.
Humans might appear starkly different from zebrafish, but they share 70 percent of the same genes, NHRI Center for Neuropsychiatric Research investigator Chen Hwei-hsien (陳慧諴) said in an institutes news release.
In a study published in the scientific journal Addiction Biology in December last year, the zebrafish conditioned place preference paradigm was found to have predictive validity in drug reward, extinction and reinstatement experiments, said Chen, who participated in the research.
Photo courtesy of the National Health Research Institutes
The paradigm has been widely used to determine the reinforcing effect of naturally rewarding or addictive substances in rodents.
Predictive validity refers to the ability of a test or other measurements to predict a future outcome.
Zebrafish paradigms had a similar predictive validity to that of mice, the current most common research animal, and are much cheaper to breed, making them a strong substitute for drug addiction research, Chen said.
The low cost of breeding the fish could help bring about a model for legally categorizing new drug types, particularly addictive substances that are constantly evolving to evade regulation, she said.
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