[A brief history of zebrafish research--toward biomedicine]

Ever since George Streisinger pioneered his research using zebrafish (Danio rerio), at the University of Oregon in 1972, the zebrafish not only has become a unique animal model in basic research, due to its fine embryonic and (molecular) genetics technique/tool developed globally, but it is also a favorite model of choice in the biomedical research, i.e., used for establishing human disease models and discovering lead drug/small chemical in the past decade. In this review, we will briefly describe the history of zebrafish research, emphasizing the well-recognized milestones, and stress how the models of leukemia, melanoma, immunity/infectious diseases and neuronal defects/neuro-degeneration diseases have been established and how pharmaceutical industry and research scientists make use of zebrafish to obtain potential therapeutic drugs. We believe that this direction of zebrafish research will lead to a better understanding of some nasty human diseases and their pathogenic mechanisms, and eventually help to achieve a better health of human beings.