The zebrafish, a translucent fish often used as a model of human development and disease, offers unique advantages for studying the cause, growth, and spread of tumors using strategies and methods presented in the current "Cancer Biology" special issue of Zebrafish, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The entire issue is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/zeb
Guest Editors Steven D. Leach, MD, the Paul K. Neumann Professor in Pancreatic Cancer and Professor of Surgery, Oncology and Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) and A. Thomas Look, MD, Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, and Vice-Chair for Research Pediatric Oncology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, MA), have compiled a comprehensive collection of papers that describe current approaches for modeling human cancer in zebrafish, studying tissue remodeling in zebrafish embryos, and understanding the genes, genetic control elements, and repair pathways involved in the development and metastasis of tumors.
A particular advantage of using zebrafish to study cancer biology is the ability to transplant human tumors into the fish using well-established methods. Authors Leonard Zon, PhD, and Alison Taylor, PhD, from Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston present the concepts and techniques relevant to zebrafish transplantation assays. They describe how tumor transplantation has been used to study leukemia, rhabdomyosarcoma, and melanoma in the paper "Zebrafish Tumor Assays: The State of Transplantation."