UC opens zebrafish research facility to study infertility
State-of-the-art reproductive health lab launches within College of Medicine
The University of Cincinnati is launching a state-of-the-art zebrafish research facility that scientists say could help explain how environmental toxins affect fertility, as Local 12/WKRC-TV and WLWT-TV/Ch. 5 recently reported.
The facility, in Kettering Lab Complex, will soon house as many as 7,000 zebrafish in 750 tanks arranged on 10 racks, as researchers study their development.
“Zebrafish develop very rapidly, so you go from a single cell to a free-swimming, eating fish in five days,” said Michelle Kossack, PhD, an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Genetics and Molecular Toxicology in the Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences. “So you can study all of those very fundamental processes of development very early.”
Kossack studies environmental toxins that may be connected to infertility. She said the zebrafish’s rapid development makes it possible to examine how exposures in the environment can disrupt normal reproduction.
“What’s really helpful is that they allow for environmental exposure,” Kossack said. “So we can test different exposures to things in the environment and see how it affects their development, or in my case, the reproduction.”
Graduate student Nicholas Casto said researchers are focusing on how specific exposures may change zebrafish development in ways that could relate to humans.
“So what we're hoping to learn is with exposure to certain environmental toxins, how is that going to change the morphology and developmental biology of some of the zebrafish and how they relate to us?” Casto said.
Kossack said infertility is increasing and remains poorly understood in many cases.
“Infertility is a growing issue in our population,” she said. “Last time it was measured, it's about 12% of couples suffer from infertility and of those sources of infertility, we still don't understand about 25% of the cases.”
Featured image at top: Zebrafish swimming in a tank. Photo/iStock/Monique Shaw.
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