Of course, there are sometimes slight differences, Ekker said. But very often its the same. Nature did not reinvent the wheel many times.

Zimmer builds zebrafish mutants, turning off their genes one by one, to study the uptake of salt in freshwater fish. Ekker has used them in his lab to isolate genes involved in childhood epilepsy and brain development. Others, all over the world, have used them to study everything from cell regeneration to cancer growth, drug toxicity and novel treatments for rare disease.

Nature did not reinvent the wheel many times

Zebrafish are whats known as a model species. Theyre one of four main models geneticists use to map out what role specific genes play in development.We just want to understand how you build an animal, said Norbert Perrimon, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Most research labs tend to specialize in one species or another. Charles Boone, at the University of Toronto, is a yeast guy. Perrimon focuses on fruit flies. There are fish people. Theres the mouse community. But no matter the species, theyre all doing some variation on the same thing: knocking out genes to find out what they do.

Its a research principle called loss of function and it underpins almost everything we know about the working lives, mishaps and miracles of genes. In fact, if loss of function studies did not exist, I dont know what we would be left with, Perrimon said.

Its a simple idea at its core, if one that has had a massive impact on modern science. To find out what something does, you shut it off and see what happens. Thats what makes genetics the closest thing there is to a fairy tale science. Its all about imagining what life would be like if some tiny part of it were never there.

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In genetics, you shut things down to find out what they do. COVID-19 has done the same to us - National Post