Diving into the world of alcohol teratogenesis: a review of zebrafish models of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder1

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) refer to the entire suite of deleterious outcomes resulting from embryonic alcohol exposure. Along with other reviews in this edition, we provide insight into how animal models, specifically the zebrafish; have informed our understanding of FASD. We first provide a brief introduction to FASD. We discuss the zebrafish as a model organism and its strengths for alcohol research. We detail how zebrafish has been used to model some of the major defects present in FASD. These include behavioral defects, such as social behavior as well as learning and memory, and structural defects, disrupting organs such as the brain, sensory organs, heart and craniofacial skeleton. We provide insights into how zebrafish research has aided in our understanding of the mechanisms of ethanol teratogenesis. We end by providing some relatively recent advances that zebrafish has provided in characterizing gene-ethanol interactions that may underlie FASD.