Understanding behavioral and physiological phenotypes of stress and anxiety in zebrafish

By R. Egan, C. Bergner, Peter C. Hart, Jonathan Cachat, PhD, P. Canavello, Marco F. Elegante, Salem Elkhayat, Brett Bartels, Anna K. Tien, David Tien and 6 more. Behavioural Brain Research, 2009

1,311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is emerging as a promising model organism for experimental studies of stress and anxiety. Here we further validate zebrafish models of stress by analyzing how environmental and pharmacological manipulations affect their behavioral and physiological phenotypes. Experimental manipulations included exposure to alarm pheromone, chronic exposure to fluoxetine, acute exposure to caffeine, as well as acute and chronic exposure to ethanol. Acute (but not chronic) alarm pheromone and acute caffeine produced robust anxiogenic effects, including reduced exploration, increased erratic movements and freezing behavior in zebrafish tested in the novel tank diving test. In contrast, ethanol and fluoxetine had robust anxiolytic effects, including increased exploration and reduced erratic movements. The behavior of several zebrafish strains was also quantified to ascertain differences in their behavioral profiles, revealing high-anxiety (leopard, albino) and low-anxiety (wild type) strains. We also used LocoScan (CleverSys Inc.) video-tracking tool to quantify anxiety-related behaviors in zebrafish, and dissect anxiety-related phenotypes from locomotor activity. Finally, we developed a simple and effective method of measuring zebrafish physiological stress responses (based on a human salivary cortisol assay), and showed that alterations in whole-body cortisol levels in zebrafish parallel behavioral indices of anxiety. Collectively, our results confirm zebrafish as a valid, reliable, and high-throughput model of stress and affective disorders.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af82713f55ec097fe89f32fd6fb7a6fcf38e4096

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1. G. Raby
2. F. Jutfelt
3. C. Maximino
4. J. Sundin
5. D. L. Oliveira
6. P. Canavello
7. Timothy D. Clark
8. K. Oliveira

Citations in the corpus

• A comparison of the light/dark and novel tank tests in zebrafish (2012, background): “, 2012), and sometimes decreases (Gerlai et al., 2008; Egan et al., 2009; Mathur & Guo, 2011; Rosemberg et al., 2012), the diving response.”
• Video-Aided Analysis of Zebrafish Locomotion and Anxiety-Related Behavioral Responses (2011, methodology): “2) demonstrate high (>80-90%) correlation between the two methods [5] for most of the major parameters assessed, confirming that the videotracking system is a reliable tool for zebrafish neurobehavioral research.”
• Two‐current choice flumes for testing avoidance and preference in aquatic animals (2017, result): “Although manual scoring may provide similar results as video tracking, the automated software tracks with higher frequency and hence increased precision (Egan et al. 2009).”