The UCL Fish Facility. (360G-Wellcome-078047_Z_05_Z)

Zebrafish is well established as a leading model organism for studying the genetic basis of vertebrate development and is fast becoming an excellent model for human diseases, for studying nervous system function in vivo, for cell biological, pharmacological and physiological studies and for analysis of gene and genome evolution. The zebrafish research community at UCL is one of the largest and most productive teams of researchers in the field. Zebrafish research at UCL entirely depends upon the UCL Fish Facility, a resource that houses several hundred genetically distinct lines of fish in 2000 tanks spread between two independent systems. However, the success of the research groups at UCL coupled with the increased availability of transgenic and mutant lines of zebrafish means that the current Facilities no longer meet the demands of the user community. Furthermore, the older and larger of the two existing systems is at the point of collapse and urgently needs replacement to avoid potentially catastrophic loss of resources. This application requests funds to replace the existing old facility and to expand the resource through construction of a third system. This project will underpin and allow expansion of research both at UCL and in the wider international community