Abstract
Many psychiatric drugs act on multiple targets and therefore require screening assays that encompass a wide target space. With sufficiently rich phenotyping and a large sampling of compounds, it should be possible to identify compounds with desired mechanisms of action on the basis of behavioral profiles alone. Although zebrafish (Danio rerio) behavior has been used to rapidly identify neuroactive compounds, it is not clear what types of behavioral assays would be necessary to identify multitarget compounds such as antipsychotics. Here we developed a battery of behavioral assays in larval zebrafish to determine whether behavioral profiles can provide sufficient phenotypic resolution to identify and classify psychiatric drugs. Using the antipsychotic drug haloperidol as a test case, we found that behavioral profiles of haloperidol-treated zebrafish could be used to identify previously uncharacterized compounds with desired antipsychotic-like activities and multitarget mechanisms of action.
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Acknowledgements
We thank members of our research groups for helpful advice. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants K01MH091449, U01MH105027 and R01AA022583 (D.K.); R44GM093456 (M.J.K.), T32EB009383 and T32GM008284 (L.G.) and R01MH086867 and R21MH085205 (R.T.P.); the Charles and Ann Sanders MGH Research Scholar Award (R.T.P.); and the Glenn Foundation Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging (D.K. and M.J.K.).
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G.B. performed the behavior-based chemical screen and preliminary analysis of the data. A.J.R. assisted with the zebrafish assays, experimental design, analysis of the finazine data and with the manuscript preparation. A.V. designed statistical analyses to profile the reference set and analyze zebrafish data. L.G. performed target prediction and enrichment calculations and interpreted data with M.J.K. M.M., E.F., J.T., P.L., D.L., T.E. and G.C. performed the zebrafish behavioral profiling and interpreted the data. P.J.L. performed the rodent work and analyzed the data with B.J.C. X.-P.H. performed the target binding assays and analyzed the data with B.L.R. S.K. and E.P. designed the psychiatric drug reference set. R.T.P. and D.K. designed the experiments and wrote the paper. All authors analyzed the data and edited the manuscript.
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A.J.R., D.K. and R.T.P. are inventors on a pending patent application, PCT/US2015/037755, covering the finazine compounds described in this manuscript. A.V., T.E., G.C. and D.L. are full-time employees of Teleos Therapeutics. D.K. and R.T.P. consult for Teleos Therapeutics. S.K. and E.P. are full-time employees of F. Hoffmann–La Roche Ltd.
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Bruni, G., Rennekamp, A., Velenich, A. et al. Zebrafish behavioral profiling identifies multitarget antipsychotic-like compounds. Nat Chem Biol 12, 559–566 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2097
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2097
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