Fishing for drugs from nature: zebrafish as a technology platform for natural product discovery

Emerging challenges within the current drug discovery paradigm are prompting renewed interest in natural products as a source of novel, bioactive small molecules. With the recent validation of zebrafish as a biomedically relevant model for functional genomics and in vivo drug discovery, the zebrafish bioassay-guided identification of natural products may be an attractive strategy to generate new lead compounds in a number of indication areas. Here, we review recent natural product research using zebrafish and evaluate the potential of this vertebrate model as a discovery platform for the systematic identification of bioactive natural products.