Zebrafish research comes of age across India
There is a quiet irony at the heart of the zebrafish story: a fish that has become one of the world’s most-used laboratory animals is, in the wild, native to the rivers and floodplains of the Indian subcontinent, including waters draining into the Ganges. The global biomedical enterprise borrowed this fish from Indian rivers decades ago — and today, Indian laboratories are drawing it back into some of the country’s most advanced disease research.
CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi was among the earliest Indian institutions to build a dedicated zebrafish programme. Functional-genomics work led by scientists such as Dr. Sridhar Sivasubbu has used the fish to study gene function and model human disease, placing IGIB among the country’s foremost zebrafish laboratories.
CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad — a name familiar to readers closer to home — has contributed research on zebrafish models of congenital disorders, including work applying CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to study conditions such as microcephaly and cardiovascular abnormalities, aligning Hyderabad’s research establishment with a field otherwise dominated by laboratories in Europe and North America.
The National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, has built a strong developmental-neuroscience programme around the fish. Professor Vatsala Thirumalai’s group uses the transparency of zebrafish larvae to trace, neuron by neuron, how circuits in the spinal cord and brain assemble themselves to produce movement — work that draws directly on the same optical clarity that makes zebrafish valuable in disease research generally.
IISER Pune’s Centre of Excellence in Epigenetics, under Professor Sanjeev Galande, has used zebrafish embryos to study how chromatin organization and Wnt signalling shape early development, while Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, hosts Dr. Sudipta Maitra’s laboratory, which works on the signalling pathways governing oocyte maturation in the fish.
Zebrafish research in India extends further still — to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the University of Calcutta, and the Central Institute of Fisheries Education, which approaches the species from a fisheries-genetics angle rather than a purely biomedical one. Binding much of this activity together is the Zebrafish Foundation India, a national community that coordinates researchers, shares genetic lines, and has convened a scientific advisory board drawing on aquatic biology, biotechnology, clinical research, and industry.
None of this is small news for a country whose biomedical research base is often measured against the scale of its pharmaceutical industry rather than the depth of its basic science. A fish that swims in Indian rivers is, today, helping Indian laboratories ask some of the same fundamental questions about human disease that are being asked in Boston, Cambridge, and Singapore — in tanks that, in a manner of speaking, never left home.
– NSH Editorial Desk
