Ethanol exposure model in zebrafish causes phenotypic, behavioral and gene expression changes that mimic Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders in human birth cohorts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) represent a significant global health challenge, characterized by physical and neurodevelopmental abnormalities in offspring resulting from prenatal alcohol exposure. This study aims to utilize the zebrafish to examine the phenotypic, behavioral, and molecular changes associated with embryonic ethanol exposure, providing a model for human FASD conditions. Our study exposed zebrafish embryos to 0.5% ethanol during a critical developmental window (2-24 hours post-fertilization) and documented significant craniofacial and cardiac deformities, which recapitulate what has been observed in human FASD in humans. Notably, exposed zebrafish exhibited reduced skull and eye sizes, thickened jaw size, and enlarged heart chambers. We found reduced burst swim distance following a touch stimulus, a novel behavioral assessment of potential deficits in sensory processing such as processing speed and/or stress/startle response, both of which are affected in human FASD. Whole-organism gene expression was found to be altered by ethanol for orthologs of four of five inflammation-related genes for which placental expression was previously found to be altered in response to alcohol in human placentas ( SERPINE1, CRHB, BCL2L1, PSMB4, PTGS2A ). We conclude that the zebrafish model effectively mimics several FASD phenotypes observed in humans, confirming gene expression changes we have previously documented in a human observational study and providing a valuable platform for exploring the underlying mechanisms of alcohol-induced embryonic alterations and for developing diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets for early intervention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".