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Science 5 July 2002:
Vol. 297. no. 5578, p. 9
DOI: 10.1126/science.297.5578.9p
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The development of reverse genetics approaches has greatly aided the study of gene function in several model organisms, such as Drosophila, Caenorhabditis elegans, and mice. However, methods have been inefficient or lacking for another vertebrate model, zebrafish. Wienholds et al. (p. 99) use a target-selected mutagenesis approach to produce point mutations in a gene whose sequence is known. They examined the role of rag1, a gene required for V(D)J recombination in the assembly of immunoglobulins, and show that mutant fish failed to produce V(D)J rearrangements in lymphocytes. Hence, this work not only provides a large-scale reverse genetics method for the analysis of zebrafish genes, but also demonstrates that zebrafish can be used in studies of the immune system.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)