Bone Abstracts

Department of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine and Centre of Marine Sciences, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

In the last decade there has been a growing interest towards the use of fish as models to understand the basic mechanisms of cartilage and bone formation, maintenance and regeneration. In particular, zebrafish and medaka have become accepted models for human skeletal development and associated pathologies such as craniofacial dysplasia, osteoporosis or osteogenesis imperfecta. The availability of an increasing set of molecular and cellular tools, as well as the development of genetic mutants and transgenic fish such as those expressing fluorescent markers specific for a given cell type or tissue, associated to the easiness in observing its internal skeleton in the transparent larval stages and in translucid adult mutant fish such as casper, contributed decisively to establish zebrafish and medaka as relevant biomedical models to analyse skeletal and mineralization-related pathologies. Another important feature of these models is the possibility of visualizing in vivo the development of the skeletal structures and thus assessing the physiological effects of a given mutation in real time. For example, by crossing a zebrafish exhibiting a mutation in the mef2c gene (mef2ca^b1086; which leads to cranial malformations among other problems) with a sox10-gfp fish we are able to clearly visualize the sites of skeletal malformations appearing during development. Because of the many applications of these fish models and the overlapping interest of many disciplines such as evolutionary and developmental biology, medicine, genetics, systematics, functional morphology, physiology, nutrition and skeletal pathologies in the fish skeleton, we believe that the use of fish can provide data relevant to further understand bone biology in health and disease.