Dr. Leonard Zon, along with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elizabeth Patton and colleagues, genetically engineered this zebrafish to make the mutated form of human BRAF, which caused the fish to develop black-pigmented moles on its skin.
When the fish were also made to be deficient for a gene called p53, which suppresses tumor growth, the moles developed into invasive melanomas resembling human cancers. The researchers' findings appear in the February 8th, 2005 issue of Current Biology.
