Abstract
The zebrafish has become an established model organism for the study of hearing and balance systems in the past two decades. The classical approach to examine hair cells is to use dye to conduct selective staining, which shows the number and morphology of hair cells but does not reveal their function. Startle response is a behavior closely related to the auditory function of hair cells; therefore it can be used to measure the function of hair cells. In this study, we developed a device to measure the startle response of zebrafish larvae. By applying various levels of stimulus, it showed that the system can discern a 10 dB difference. The hair cell in zebrafish can regenerate after damage due to noise exposure or drug treatment. With this device, we measured the startle response of zebrafish larvae during and after drug treatment. The results show a similar trend to the classical hair cell staining method. The startle response was reduced with drug treatment and recovered after removal of the drug. Together it demonstrated the capability of this behavioral assay in evaluating the hair cell functions of fish larvae and its potential as a high-throughput screening tool for auditory-related gene and drug discovery.
Highlights
Due to its miniature size, prolific reproduction, and the external development of the transparent embryo, the zebrafish is a leading model for developmental and genetic studies, as well as in toxicology and omics-based research [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Using the same experimental condition with neomycin treatment, we evaluated the startle response with our in-house instrument system
We developed a behavioral assay to evaluate the auditory function of hair cells by measuring the startle
Summary
Due to its miniature size, prolific reproduction, and the external development of the transparent embryo, the zebrafish is a leading model for developmental and genetic studies, as well as in toxicology and omics-based research [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Despite being genetically more distant from humans than other models, the vertebrate zebrafish has comparable organs and tissues, such as heart, kidney, pancreas, bone, cartilage, and even hearing organs [7, 8]. The zebrafish is nowadays an established animal model for gene and drug screening in auditory research and has become a popular model organism for the study of hearing and balance system over the past 20 years [9,10,11,12]. Several dozens of hearing-related genes have been discovered in zebrafish and many of them influence the inner ear of humans and other vertebrates [7, 8]. Recent advances in studying the biophysical properties of the zebrafish hair cell provided evidence on how to relate the findings in the zebrafish hair cell to their mammalian counterpart [14, 15]
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