TY - JOUR TI - Respiratory depression and analgesia by opioid drugs in freely behaving larval zebrafish AU - Zaig, Shenhab AU - da Silveira Scarpellini, Carolina AU - Montandon, Gaspard A2 - Basbaum, Allan A2 - Taffe, Michael A2 - Marino Ramirez, Jan VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/03/15 SP - e63407 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e63407 DO - 10.7554/eLife.63407 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63407 AB - An opioid epidemic is spreading in North America with millions of opioid overdoses annually. Opioid drugs, like fentanyl, target the mu opioid receptor system and induce potentially lethal respiratory depression. The challenge in opioid research is to find a safe pain therapy with analgesic properties but no respiratory depression. Current discoveries are limited by lack of amenable animal models to screen candidate drugs. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an emerging animal model with high reproduction and fast development, which shares remarkable similarity in their physiology and genome to mammals. However, it is unknown whether zebrafish possesses similar opioid system, respiratory and analgesic responses to opioids than mammals. In freely-behaving larval zebrafish, fentanyl depresses the rate of respiratory mandible movements and induces analgesia, effects reversed by μ-opioid receptor antagonists. Zebrafish presents evolutionary conserved mechanisms of action of opioid drugs, also found in mammals, and constitute amenable models for phenotype-based drug discovery. KW - zebrafish KW - opioid KW - fentanyl KW - breathing KW - analgesia JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -