Familiarity Does Not Breed Contempt: Female mating preference is influenced by social familiarity in various species from fish to primates. Okuyama et al. (p. 91 ) showed in Japanese rice fish that females prefer to mate with visually familiarized males over unfamiliar males and that this preference is mediated by specific neuromodulatory neurons in the female brain.

Background: Cryptochromes (CRY), members of the DNA photolyase/cryptochrome protein family, regulate the circadian clock in animals and plants. Two types of animal CRYs are known, mammalian CRY and Drosophila CRY. Both CRYs participate in the regulation of circadian rhythm, but they have different light dependencies for their reactions and have different effects on the negative feedback loop which generates a circadian oscillation of gene expression. Mammalian CRYs act as a potent inhibitor of transcriptional activator whose reactions do not depend on light, but Drosophila CRY functions as a light‐dependent suppressor of transcriptional inhibitor.Results: We cloned seven zebrafish genes that carry members of the DNA photolyase/cryptochrome protein family; one (6‐4)photolyase and six cry genes. A sequence analysis and determination of their in vitro functions showed that these zebrafish cry genes constitute two groups. One has a high sequence similarity to mammalian cry genes and inhibits CLOCK:BMAL1 mediated transcription. The other, which has a higher sequence similarity to the Drosophila cry gene rather than the mammalian cry genes, does not carry transcription inhibitor activity. The expressions of these cry genes oscillate in a circadian manner, but their patterns differ.Conclusions: These findings suggest that functionally diverse cry genes are present in zebrafish and each gene has different role in the molecular clock.

We have established a reverse genetics approach for the routine generation of medaka (Oryzias latipes) gene knockouts. A cryopreserved library of N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) mutagenized fish was screened by high-throughput resequencing for induced point mutations. Nonsense and splice site mutations were retrieved for the Blm, Sirt1, Parkin and p53 genes and functional characterization of p53 mutants indicated a complete knockout of p53 function. The current cryopreserved resource is expected to contain knockouts for most medaka genes.