An adult zebrafish model for preclinical tuberculosis vaccine development.

•A novel vaccine is needed to relieve the global tuberculosis burden.•Adult zebrafish is a well-established non-mammalian vertebrate model for studying mycobacterial infection.•We show in this paper that zebrafish can be immunized against mycobacterial infection using BCG or a DNA-based vaccine.•Vaccine-induced protection in zebrafish depends on the adaptive immune response.•Zebrafish is a promising new model for tuberculosis vaccine research including preclinical vaccine antigen identification.