Morphant

An organism which has been treated with a morpholino antisense oligo to temporarily knock down expression of a targeted gene is called a morphant.

Background

This term was coined by Prof. Steve Ekker[1] to describe the zebrafish with which he was experimenting; by knocking down embryonic gene expression using Morpholinos, Prof. Ekker "phenocopied" known zebrafish mutations, that is, he raised embryos that had the same morphological phenotype as embryonic zebrafish with specific gene mutations. Prof. Ekker's papers[2] and presentations describing morphant phenocopies of mutant phenotypes, in combination with Prof. Janet Heasman's earlier work[3] with Morpholinos in Xenopus embryos, led to rapid adoption of Morpholino technology by the developmental biology community.

References
  1. Ekker SC (December 2000). "Morphants: a new systematic vertebrate functional genomics approach". Yeast. 17 (4): 302–306. doi:10.1002/1097-0061(200012)17:4<302::AID-YEA53>3.0.CO;2-#. PMC 2448384. PMID 11119307.
  2. Nasevicius A, Ekker SC (October 2000). "Effective targeted gene 'knockdown' in zebrafish". Nat. Genet. 26 (2): 216–20. doi:10.1038/79951. PMID 11017081. S2CID 21451111.
  3. Heasman J, Kofron M, Wylie C (June 2000). "Beta-catenin signaling activity dissected in the early Xenopus embryo: a novel antisense approach". Dev. Biol. 222 (1): 124–34. doi:10.1006/dbio.2000.9720. PMID 10885751.


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