Investigating behavioural and neural alterations in zebrafish seizure and epilepsy models

Zebrafish is becoming an increasingly popular animal for modelling seizures and epilepsy. Various pharmacological and genetic models are utilized for both discovering new anti-epileptic drugs and for investigating fundamental mechanisms regulating neural excitability, seizures, and epilepsy. We aimed at developing multiple pharmacologically induced seizure and epilepsy models, in order to utilize these models for high-throughput behavioural screens and for functional brain imaging. We showed that several parameters of locomotor behaviours and spatial exploration are altered in seizure and epilepsy models, both during spontaneous and evoked behaviours. We investigate spatio-temporal dynamics of brain activity in these models. Our preliminary results revealed that multiple seizure focus develop across diverse brain regions, before generalized seizures spread across the brain. We are currently studying how these neural and behavioural activity patterns are modulated by various anti-epileptic drug treatments.