To enable broader adoption of zebrafish for toxicological screening, NTP established the Systematic Evaluation of the Application of Zebrafish in Toxicology (SEAZIT) program.
An initial information-gathering phase of the SEAZIT program identified a need for an interlaboratory study to more closely examine the effects of variation in key protocol elements in developmental toxicity studies. This study began in 2019, and participating laboratories are conducting dose range-finding experiments. The study is designed to determine the effect of chorion removal and exposure media renewal on study outcomes. Participating laboratories will use in-house protocols to test a defined chemical set while varying the two protocol elements under investigation. The chemical set, which was designed to provide overlap with other NTP studies, includes chemicals with a range of physicochemical properties and developmental effects. Many of the chemicals have in vivo reference data available from rodent and other zebrafish studies. The interlaboratory study includes a pilot effort on chemical kinetics in support of future studies of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion in zebrafish.
A primary goal of SEAZIT is to develop best practices for data analysis. To this end, the data generated in this study will be made publicly available, so that all study data may be used by investigators to estimate consensus toxicity values for each chemical.