SAN MARCOS -- Texas State University in San Marcos is home to an amazing collection of fish. These are not pets, though. They’re important elements of ongoing experiments to find answers to complex human health problems.
There’s something fishy going on inside a lab with an exotic-sounding name: the Xiphophorus Genetic Stock Center. Living in the 1400 aquaria is a unique collection of thousands of tropical fish bred specifically to have traceable genetic patterns.
Geneticist Ron Walter, Ph.D., is director and a big fan of this important animal model.
“Fish genetics and human genetics are much more similar than people would like to think,” he said.
For instance, one line is bred to study melanoma. These fish are born to get skin cancer. But the process isn’t easy. Workers have to harvest sperm from the males and artificially inseminate the females in a cross-species experiment. The process is tedious and painstaking.
Then, the fish with the predisposition for cancer are exposed to UV light to see if and how quickly they’ll develop melanoma. Someday, the data collected here will allow people to be tested to know their chances of developing a killer skin cancer.
“If we know the setup, you could be genotyped individually and be told maybe you don’t want to be a lifeguard, maybe you do,” Walter explained.
These platyfish and swordtails are from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. In some cases, they are close to extinction in the wild. The successful breeding program here also feeds experiments for other scientists.
“We supply fish all over the world,” Walter stated.
This collection of pedigreed fish is funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health. Much of the cancer research is being performed in conjunction with M.D. Anderson.
