First quantitative high-throughput screen in zebrafish identifies novel pathways for increasing pancreatic β-cell mass
- Johns Hopkins University, United States
- Georgia Regents University, United States
- University of Macau, China
Abstract
Whole-organism chemical screening can circumvent bottlenecks that impede drug discovery. However, in vivo screens have not attained throughput capacities possible with in vitro assays. We therefore developed a method enabling in vivo high-throughput screening (HTS) in zebrafish, termed automated reporter quantification in vivo (ARQiv). Here, ARQiv was combined with robotics to fully actualize whole-organism HTS (ARQiv-HTS). In a primary screen, this platform quantified cell-specific fluorescent reporters in >500,000 transgenic zebrafish larvae to identify FDA-approved drugs that increased the number of insulin-producing β cells in the pancreas. Twenty-four drugs were confirmed as inducers of endocrine differentiation and/or stimulators of β-cell proliferation. Further, we discovered novel roles for NF-κB signaling in regulating endocrine differentiation and for serotonergic signaling in selectively stimulating β-cell proliferation. These studies demonstrate the power of ARQiv-HTS for drug discovery and provide unique insights into signaling pathways controlling β-cell mass, potential therapeutic targets for treating diabetes.
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Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved animal care and use committee (ACUC) protocols of Johns Hopkins University and Georgia Regents University
Copyright
© 2015, Wang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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First quantitative high-throughput screen in zebrafish identifies novel pathways for increasing pancreatic β-cell mass
eLife 4:e08261.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08261
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