Stress resilience is established during development and is regulated by complement factors

Individuals in a population respond differently to stressful situations. While resilient individuals recover efficiently, others are susceptible to the same stressors. Most existing information regarding the factors regulating stress resilience in vertebrates is from specific areas of the brain from adult rodents or humans. In order to study resilience during development, we established a new paradigm to identify resilience in zebrafish larvae. Using this assay, we identified resilient and susceptible subsets of zebrafish larvae at 6 days post fertilization and performed gene expression analysis on whole larvae. Total RNA from resilient and susceptible groups was extracted either at basal conditions or 30 minutes following a 5 minute stress. 5 biological replicates (1 larva per sample) were subjected to next-generation sequencing.