Deep phenotyping in zebrafish reveals genetic and diet-induced adiposity changes that may inform disease risk

The regional distribution of adipose tissues is implicated in a wide range of diseases. For example, proportional increases in visceral adipose tissue increase the risk for insulin resistance, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Zebrafish offer a tractable model system by which to obtain unbiased and quantitative phenotypic information on regional adiposity, and deep phenotyping can explore complex disease-related adiposity traits. To facilitate deep phenotyping of zebrafish adiposity traits, we used pairwise correlations between 67 adiposity traits to generate stage-specific adiposity profiles that describe changing adiposity patterns and relationships during growth. Linear discriminant analysis classified individual fish according to adiposity profile with 87.5% accuracy. Deep phenotyping of eight previously uncharacterized zebrafish mutants identified neuropilin 2b as a novel gene that alters adipose distribution. When we applied deep phenotyping to identify changes in adiposity dur...