the ZF-HEALTH project

ZF-HEALTH: Zebrafish Regulomics for Human Health.(Started last July 2011)

A Pan-European research consortium formed by 19 different organizations, in which ZF BioLabs is included, received the approval by the Seven Framework Program evaluators. This is a Collaborative Large-scale integrating project addressing the topic “HEALTH-2009-2.1.1-1: Large-scale functional genomics effort in multicellular organisms to elucidate the function of human genes product.

The focus is on rare diseases associated with mutations in nuclear-encoded mitochondrial proteins. Mitochondrial dysfunction has emerged as a potential ‘lowest common denominator’ linking many well known neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Hungtington’s disease and other diseases classified as rare for its low prevalence. In the later group are found two mitochondrial diseases associated with mutations in nuclear-encoded mitochondrial proteins: Friedreich ataxia and Leigh syndrome. Until mutants in these mithochondrial diseases from WP1 are available, two genes will be knocked-down to construct morphant Zebrafish as models of these human diseases: frataxin, as a model for Friedreich’s ataxia and ndufs8 as a mode for Leigh Syndrome. These morphants are being used to perform a moderate-throughput screening of compounds to identify suppressors of disease phenotypes.