"Behavioral study of adult Zebrafish after brain trauma"

Abstract

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an excellent model-organism in biomedical research, useful in many fields such as neurobiology, toxicology, genetics, environmental biology, ecotoxicology, regenerative medicine, etc. Zebrafish has many genetic and physiological similarities to vertebrates as humans including the brain, which is of particular importance in this research. In addition, approximately 70% of human disease - related genes have homologues to those of Zebrafish. Its use in biomedical research has been an integral part of research and has led to very important results in fields related to human diseases. In this study, the topic of concern was Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI), caused by an appropriately designed weight drop model in the skull of fish individuals, and its effect on their behavior parameters a few days after TBI treatment.

Traumatic brain injury has become particularly popular and has gained much interest the recent years as more than one million people per year suffer from brain injuries categorized as either mild or more severe, while about 50,000 people a year die from serious brain injuries. In this study, the effect of brain injury on the behavior of zebrafish individuals up to six days after TBI was studied. Specifically, individuals were divided into two groups, the control group, and the TBI group. The control group consisted of 24 fish individuals who underwent anesthesia, and their behavior was studied for six days after the day of anesthesia. The TBI group consisted of 5 individuals in total, who were anesthetized, and were all hit with the same weight with a skull weight drop model, and then their behavior was studied for six days after trauma treatment. Using the cross-maze test (Noldus), behavior parameters were recorded for 30 min and video tracking files were analyzed using EthovisionXT (Noldus, Netherlands). Behavior parameters that were studied include total distance traveled (cm), developed speed (cm/sec) and mobility (%), as well as the frequency of visits to different zones of the behavior control system and showed statistically significant differences between the two groups of individuals. Using the cross-maze test, results show that there is statistically significance between the behavior parameters of the two groups.

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