Zebrafish models of leukemia

The zebrafish, Danio rerio, is a well-established, invaluable model system for the study of human cancers. The genetic pathways that drive oncogenesis are highly conserved between zebrafish and humans, and multiple unique attributes of the zebrafish make it a tractable tool for analyzing the underlying cellular processes that give rise to human disease. In particular, the high conservation between human and zebrafish hematopoiesis (Jing & Zon, 2011) has stimulated the development of zebrafish models for human hematopoietic malignancies to elucidate molecular pathogenesis and to expedite the preclinical investigation of novel therapies. While T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia was the first transgenic cancer model in zebrafish (Langenau et al., 2003), a wide spectrum of zebrafish models of human hematopoietic malignancies has been established since 2003, largely through transgenesis and genome-editing approaches. This chapter presents key examples that validate the zebrafish as an indispensable model system for the study of hematopoietic malignancies and highlights new models that demonstrate recent advances in the field.