ZNStress: a high-throughput drug screening protocol for identification of compounds modulating neuronal stress in the transgenic mutant sod1G93R zebrafish model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Background Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with death on average within 2–3 years of symptom onset. Mutations in superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) have been identified to cause ALS. Riluzole, the only neuroprotective drug for ALS provides life extension of only 3 months on average. Thishighlights the need for compound screening in disease models to identify new neuroprotective therapies for this disease. Zebrafish is an emerging model system that is well suited for the study of diseasepathophysiology and also for high throughput (HT) drug screening. The mutant sod1 zebrafish model of ALS mimics the hallmark features of ALS. Using a fluorescence based readout of neuronal stress, we developed a high throughput (HT) screen to identify neuroprotective compounds. Results Here we show that the zebrafish screen is a robust system that can be used to rapidly screen thousands ofcompounds and also demonstrate that riluzole is capable of reducing neuronal stress in this model system. The screen shows optimal quality control, maintaining a high sensitivity and specificity withoutcompromising throughput. Most importantly, we demonstrate that many compounds previously failed in human clinical trials, showed no stress reducing activity in the zebrafish assay. Conclusion We conclude that HT drug screening using a mutant sod1 zebrafish is a reliable model system which supplemented with secondary assays would be useful in identifying drugs with potential for neuroprotective efficacy in ALS. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13024-016-0122-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.