Profile

Zebrafish Research Focus

I am the founding director of the Zebrafish Centre for Advanced Drug Discovery (https://www.zebrafishcentre.com). Funded by CFI, we have built a fully automated, robotic high throughput screening platform for direct in vivo drug screening using zebrafish embryos. This platform represents a state-of-art screening platform for zebrafish, the first one in Canada and one of the most advanced zebrafish screening platforms worldwide. My lab is actively involved in zebrafish disease modeling and high throughput drug screen, and is a member of the International Zebrafish Protein Trap Consortium (www.zfishbook.org) to develop a zebrafish gene trap mutant database. We are also generating transgenic transgenic zebrafish lines carrying mutant human genes. We have used morpholino-based technologies to knockdown zebrafish genes and are now generating zebrafish gene knockout/knockin mutations using CRISPR technology. I am also organizing a biennial international Zebrafish for Personalized & Precision Medicine Conference in Toronto. (https://www.zebrafishcentre.com/conference-2017/). I have established a number of collaborations with scientists and clinicians in studying rare diseases. I am actively collaborating with Dr. Clara Van Karnebeek in zebrafish modeling and studying metabolic enzyme deficiencies including NANS (N-actyl neuraminic acid synthase) and NPL (N-acetylneuraminate pyruvate lyase), which are involved in sialic acid metabolism. Most recently, we are collaborating on two new rare disease genes glutamic-oxaloacetic transaminase 2 (GOT2) and glutaminase 1 (GLS1).

• Genes
• Terms