Plumbing the mysteries of vascular development using the zebrafish.

The zebrafish has recently emerged as an advantageous model organism for studying how the stereotypic and evolutionarily conserved network of vertebrate blood vessels arises during development. The ability to screen for vascular-specific mutants and to image and experimentally manipulate blood vessels throughout living embryos has already yielded new insights into the anatomy of the early vasculature, the dynamics of growing blood vessels, the specification of early vascular progenitors, and arterial-venous differentiation of blood vessels.