Dr. Sean Spagnoli, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, was featured in the latest issue of Nature. He discovered that a common parasite that infects laboratory zebrafish may have been confounding the results of years of behavioural experiments.
Zebrafish are fast replacing white mice in research labs worldwide for the study of everything from the effects of drugs, to genetic diseases and disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. Since both zebrafish and people are highly social, researchers think that zebrafish may be a better lab model for some human behaviours than rodents.
Zebrafish demonstrate their preference for each other by clustering into shoals – a social behaviour that researchers measure when they want to test how drugs affect zebrafish stress and anxiety levels, as a proxy for potential human responses. But this behaviour can change when fish are infected with a neural parasite called Pseudoloma neurophilia. Spagnoli found that individual fish infected with P. neurophilia swim closer to each other than do non-infected fish, casting doubt on results from previous experiments.
