Advancing functional transcriptomics in zebrafish with high-accuracy full-length RNA sequencing

These similarities make findings from zebrafish studies more applicable to human biology than those from in vitro or non-vertebrate models. Despite having one of the best annotated genomes among model organisms, zebrafish genome annotations have seen limited updates in recent years, lagging significantly behind human annotations.

This outdated information contributes to inaccuracies in RNA sequencing analysis, gene quantification, and other downstream analyses, reducing zebrafish’s effectiveness as a model. To address these issues, we implemented CapTrap-seq, a platform-agnostic approach to sequence full-length zebrafish transcriptomes across key developmental stages and adult tissues. Our findings indicate that CapTrap-seq delivers manual-quality genome annotations at high-throughput, helping to complete and expand zebrafish gene information and link it to broad biological contexts.