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  Channel NewsAsia 22 Apr 07
S'pore scientists research fish to find cures for human diseases

SINGAPORE: As scientists continue to look for answers to human diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and even the common asthma, those working at the forefront of Singapore's biomedical science efforts have turned to a rather unexpected source - fish.

Besides belonging to a really exotic aquarium, zebrafish, the fugu and the odd-looking elephant fish could also hold the key to future treatments for a number of human diseases.

Professor Philip Ingham, who joined Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology from the United Kingdom last August, is a world expert in using zebrafish to study how diseases behave in humans.

"This is one of the most exciting things about the zebrafish, because it's such a great model for understanding developmental and disease processes," says Professor Ingham.

"It is a vertebrate, it's a very small vertebrate and easy to keep. And it has various attributes. For instance, the early embryos are almost completely transparent so it makes it very easy to see individual cells and to identify individual organs," he continues.

This allows researchers to easily breed strains of zebrafish with different conditions, and test out different molecules to treat them, and could eventually lead to drugs that work on human beings.

"Actually to a biologist, fish and humans are remarkably similar. First of all, they're both vertebrate, so they have what we call the same basic body plans.

"If you look at the fish it has all of the same characteristics that we have. It's rather like comparing a small Cessna training plane with an A380 Airbus. Superficially they look very different. But they actually have the same basic plan and design, and they work along the same principles," says Professor Ingham.

Another team of researchers at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) has turned to the elephant shark as a key to understanding how, exactly, the human genome works.

Principle Investigator at IMCB Professor Byrappa Venkatesh says, "Sharks are the oldest groups of living vertebrates. So they are like our distant relatives, distant cousins. By comparing with the sharks, you can get a very stringent comparison, where you can identify elements that are conserved over a very long period of evolution.

"We spent about two to three years to do some exploratory work to find a shark which has a very small genome. A small genome means it has less of the so-called junk sequence, so it is much easier to sequence its genome as well as to identify the genes in such genomes. So finally we zeroed in on the elephant shark, which happens to have the smallest genome."

The elephant shark is a rare breed, found only in the deep ocean off Melbourne, Australia, and the team has thus far finished analysing 80 per cent of its genome.

Says Professor Byrappa Venkatesh, "One of the major surprises was we found that the human genome is much more similar to the elephant shark genome than to fish like the zebrafish or fugu. This was unexpected because humans are closer to the zebrafish and fugu, rather than to sharks. That means the shark genome and the human genome have been evolving at almost a similar rate."

When fully sequenced in the next two years, the elephant shark's genome will be made public for other scientists, seeking clues to curing human diseases. - CNA/yy
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