The zebrafish is an excellent model to study blood vessel formation. Zebrafish embryos develop rapidly - by day 1 of development they have formed a basic circulatory network that carries blood flow. Another major benefit is that zebrafish embryos are transparent allowing detailed visualization of endothelial cells that line all blood vessels. Since the signals that are important for blood vessel development in zebrafish are quite similar to those in mouse and humans our findings are relevant to blood vessel formation in disease states.

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