On 3–7 July 2017, the European Zebrafish Meeting will take place in Budapest, where the most important scientific capacity chiefly dealing with model organism Zebrafish meets annually. Zebrafish are used to study serious human diseases such as hematopoietic disorders or various types of cancers.

Right at the beginning of this conference, the doctoral candidate Jana Oltová from the team of Dr. Petr Bartůněk from the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the CAS had her lecture. During her presentation, Jana Oltová introduced the database Zebrabase. At this time, the database contains all of the information on Zebrafish, which are bred at the IMG. With each fish, it is possible to search who its parents were, how its genetic information has been changed, or which fluorescent protein Is created in its body or in precisely which aquarium it is. Zebrabase was originally developed at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the CAS for the needs of the local breeding of Zebrafish, but its creators decided to provide this marvellous tool also to other institutions all over the world, which is terrific, because the development of such a database is financially and technically demanding and for small institutions or individual laboratories it is very difficult to develop something like this just for themselves. Using the database, the users will have the opportunity to observe the state of their fish farming form any device, with the help of the QR codes, they will, moreover, have immediate access to information on the individual fishes.

Until Sunday at midnight, Zebrabase served only the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the CAS, but that is already the past today and anyone who wants to use this database is welcome to.

More information: https://zebrabase.org/ and http://www.img.cas.cz/en/

Prepared by: Vladka Coufalova, Department of Media Communication of the CAS
Photo: Institute of Molecular Genetics of the CAS