"ZF-HEALTH - Zebrafish Regulomics for Human Health" is a Large-scale Integrating Project funded by the European Commission as part of its Seventh Framework Programme (EC Grant Agreement HEALTH-F4-2010-242048). The project started on July 1, 2010 and is scheduled to run over a period of five and a half years.

ZF-HEALTH builds on technologies and concepts developed in the preceding ZF-MODELS project. It aims to utilise these advances for the high-throughput phenotyping of at least a thousand regulatory genes relevant for human disease, by behavioural assays (for viable mutants), 3D / 4D imaging and expression profiling (by high-throughput sequencing). We will further characterise regulatory elements of such genes by a combination of bioinformatics and transgenics. Small-molecule screening for mutant rescue or disease-relevant processes will identify candidate drugs and provide insights into gene function. Our increasing knowledge on the regulators and their interactions with regulatory targets will be integrated with knowledge at cellular and organismic level. By capitalising on the virtues of the zebrafish system, this systems biology approach to the regulome will gain unique knowledge complementing ongoing work in mammalian systems, and provide important new stimuli for biomedical research.

The research effort is divided in five workpackages covering:

• Generation and distribution of mutants for potential human disease genes
• Phenotyping of mutants
  
• Characterisation of enhancer elements of human disease genes
• Gene expression mapping in the brain
• Small molecule screening

For a more detailed summary, please download our flyer (PDF).

An archival version of the ZF-MODELS website is here.