It has been nearly a decade since the completion of two large-scale chemical mutagenesis screens in zebrafish, and two years since the completion of a large-scale insertional mutagenesis. In this article, we use the accumulated data from these screens to compare the efficiency of each mutagen to isolate mutants and to identify mutated genes, and argue that the two mutagens target the same set of genes. We then review how both forward genetic screens and reverse genetic techniques, such as morpholinos and TILLING, and transgenics are being used to develop models of human disease.