Zebrafish can find a way to compensate for a mutated gene, but artificial methods of inactivating the same gene are not so readily overcome, a new study suggests.
These findings, reported July 13 in Nature, add fuel to a technical debate among researchers about how to tell what a gene does in an organism.
An organism’s alternate strategy to compensate for a mutated gene can mask the gene’s absence. Zebrafish possess such a workaround for a mutation in a gene involved in blood vessel development, the new research finds. But fish with a normal copy of the gene can’t cope when researchers artificially block protein production from the same gene. Blocking protein production ought to have the same effect as a genetic mutation, but the fish handle the challenges differently, the researchers found.