Testing biological actions of medicinal plants from Northern Vietnam on zebrafish embryos and larvae: developmental, behavioral, and putative therapeutical effects.

Evaluating the risks and benefits of using traditional medicinal plants is of utmost importance for a huge fraction of the human population, in particular in Northern Vietnam. Zebrafish are increasingly used as a simple vertebrate model for testing toxic and physiological effects of compounds, especially on development. Here, we tested 12 ethanolic extracts from popular medicinal plants collected in Northern Vietnam for their effects on zebrafish survival and development during the first 4 days after fertilization. We characterized more in detail their effects on epiboly, hatching, growth, necrosis, body curvature, angiogenesis, skeletal development and mostly increased movement behavior. Finally, we confirm the effect on epiboly caused by the Mahonia bealei extract by staining the actin filaments and show that this extract also inhibits cell migration of mouse embryo fibroblasts. In conclusion, we show that zebrafish early life stages reveal that traditional medicinal plant extracts are able to affect embryo development to various degrees, prompting caution to apply these medications to pregnant women. In addition, we show that an extract causing delay in epiboly also inhibits mammalian cell migration, suggesting that this effect may serve as a preliminary test for identifying extracts that inhibit cancer metastasis. Zebrafish embryos were treated with an ethanolic extract from stems of Mahonia bealei and RNA extracted from 8 hours post-fertilization for whole larvae RNA-Seq. 4 controls and 4 treated samples were analyzed.