title: Out with the old, in with the new: reassessing morpholino knockdowns in light of genome editing technology.
abstract: Morpholino oligomers have been used widely and for many years in the zebrafish community to transiently knock down the function of target genes. It has often been difficult, however, to reliably discriminate between specific and non-specific effects, and thus generally accepted guidelines to control for morpholino side effects do not exist. In light of recent methodologies to generate mutant lines in virtually any zebrafish gene, we discuss these different approaches with a specific focus on how the first description of a loss-of-function phenotype in zebrafish should be accomplished.
authors.affiliation: Hubrecht Institute-KNAW & UMC Utrecht, Utrecht 3584CT, The Netherlands WWU Münster, Institute for Cardiovascular Organogenesis and Regeneration, Faculty of Medicine, Münster 48149, Germany s.schulte@hubrecht.eu.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schulte-Merker
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, Department of Developmental Genetics, Bad Nauheim 61231, Germany.
authors.forename: Didier Y R
authors.initials: DY
authors.lastname: Stainier
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005821:Genetic Techniques / Q000639:trends; D016678:Genome; D060172:Morpholinos / Q000235:genetics*; D009154:Mutation; D010641:Phenotype; D015027:Zebrafish
chemical_list: D060172:Morpholinos