Question: why do you choose zebra fish?

Alberto Lapedriza answered on 18 Jun 2013:

Zebrafish are a small (around 3 or 4 cm long) freshwater fish that has been used in research for 15 years more or less. They have lots of advantages in comparison to other lab animals such as mice or flies. Because they are so small, we can have thousands of them in a small aquarium, and they are cheaper and easier to maintain than mice. Their embryos develop in eggs outside the parents, which means that we can study their development in real time from the moment of fertilisation, without disturbing the embryos. The embryos are transparent, so we can see how they develop in real time using a microscope. And even though you may think they are very different to us, they actually share with us more than 70 % of its genes. That makes zebrafish a really powerful tool to study human diseases. And it’s also a very nice animal to work with!