It has recently been reported that a common side effect of translation-blocking morpholino antisense oligonucleotides is the induction of a set of innate immune response genes in Xenopus embryos and that splicing-blocking morpholinos lead to unexpected off-target mis-splicing events. Here, we present an analysis of all publicly available Xenopus RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data in a reexamination of the effects of translation-blocking morpholinos on the innate immune response. Our analysis does not support the authors' general conclusion, which was based on a limited number of RNA-seq datasets. Moreover, the strong induction of an immune response appears to be specific to the tbxt/tbxt2 morpholinos. The more comprehensive study presented here indicates that using morpholinos for targeted gene knockdowns remains of considerable value for the rapid identification of gene function.
Keywords: Xenopus; brachyury; gene knockdown; innate immune response; loss of function; reverse genetics; tbxt; translation blocking morpholino; zebrafish.
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