Zebrafish Behavioral Profiling Links Drugs to Biological Targets and Rest/Wake Regulation

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Abstract
Behavioral Profiling: The complexity of the brain makes it difficult to predict how a drug will affect behavior without direct testing in live animals. Rihel et al. (p. 348 ) developed a high-throughput assay to assess the effects of thousands of drugs on sleep/wake behaviors of zebrafish larvae. The data set reveals a broad conservation of zebrafish and mammalian sleep/wake pharmacology and identifies pathways that regulate sleep. Moreover, the biological targets of poorly characterized small molecules can be predicted by matching their behavioral profiles to those of well-known drugs. Thus, behavioral profiling in zebrafish offers a cost-effective way to characterize neuroactive drugs and to predict biological targets of novel compounds.