I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
It certainly wouldn’t help in my current research! But when I did my PhD, I was looking at the genetics of barramundi across Australia. I wanted to figure out if barramundi were the same all over, or if they were different enough that we should be moving them around for aquaculture and recreational fish stocking purposes. I also wanted to know where they came from originally (they exist all the way up to Vietnam, and throughout Asia). So I caught barramundi (or asked other people to help me catch them), and took a tiny clip of fin from their tail. They don’t have any nerves there, so it didn’t hurt them. Then I put them back in the water to swim away and make more barramundi. When I got the fin clips back to the lab, I chopped them up, extracted the DNA, and analyzed it. I found out that barramundi are pretty different in lots of the areas of Australia, and that they probably came here from Indonesia during a time of low sea levels, and landed in the Ord River area (in the Northern Territory). Then they spread across the top of Australia from there. It was a great project, and lots of fun because I got to travel around and see some amazing places!
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Hi blissy and jackevo,
Unfortunately we don’t use the fish as an animal model in our research of the gut BUT the zebrafish is well studied for the development of the enteric nervous system (ENS) or the ‘mini brain’ of the gut. Zebrafish are an important animal model for studying development of many different organ systems as the fish reproduce fast and are easy to study.
There are even genetical modifed zebrafish (which have a gene inserted in them from a jellyfish) which make them glow in the dark which can be used to study environmental pollutants in the water.
https://science.time.com/2012/04/23/a-new-pollution-tracker-glow-in-the-dark-fish/ or can be used for sushi https://www.glowingsushi.com/
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Hi Blissy,
Fish can be used to research certain things, yes.
In fact I have looked at zebrafish myself, which until a certain age, are completely transparent. What we can do is make certain cells in the body of the zebrafish fluoresce so that we can see the in real time. See what they do, where they go, how they interact with other cells. It’s all really cool. 😀
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Well, i eat a lot of tuna, and that’s a fish and it helps my brain stay strong and me come to work and do science! Does that count?
I don’t use fish in my research, but i have lots of friends who work with zebrafish, like the others have talked about!
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Like the others, I don’t use fish in my research. However, my earliest experiments (as a small kid) were on fish. After a fishing expedition, my dad and I used to investigate what the fish had eaten by cutting open their stomachs! Other people in my family used to think doing this was pretty gross but we were just curious. 😉
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