A researcher at the University of Cincinnati is working to better understand infertility in humans with the help of thousands of tiny fish.
Michelle Kossack is an assistant professor of environmental and public health sciences. She’s using zebrafish as an animal model to study how exposure to dioxin, a byproduct of many industrial processes, impacts reproductive health in humans.
According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 6 adults experience infertility. Kossack says doctors struggle to find causes for about a quarter of those people.
“The environment plays a significant role in our health and how our bodies work,” Kossack said. “So, I wanted to see, what might be happening during our development and throughout our lives? What are we exposed to that could disrupt that development and make it more difficult for people to have babies?”
UC is opening its first zebrafish research facility to support this work. The lab can hold up to 7,000 of these fish, which share 70% of their genes with humans.
“A lot of those genes, we can study how they work and how they interact with these different cell types, and monitor how all of those things change in kind of a smaller, more simple environment,” Kossack said.
She adds that zebrafish also develop quickly, growing from a single cell to a free-swimming, eating fish in about five days.
Kossack says she hopes her findings can inform future treatments and help make people healthier.
“We're not just studying fish for fish sakes,” Kossack said. “We're studying it so that we can learn more about biology, and we can slowly be able to develop all of these cures that we now have the benefit of having in our society.”
She says she hopes to collaborate with more scientists in the zebrafish facility and look into other environmental sources of reduced fertility, especially ones local to the Cincinnati area.
The lab is partially funded through a three-year, $750,000 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences career transition grant.
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