Morpholino oligonucleotide-triggered knockdown reveals a role for maternal E-cadherin during early mouse development.

We report that gene silencing via intracytoplasmic microinjections of morpholino-modified antisense oligonucleotides is an effective and reproducible method to study both maternal and zygotic gene functions during early and late stages of mouse preimplantation development. The zygotic expression of the beta-geo transgene in the ROSA26 mouse strain could be inhibited until at least the early blastula stages. Thus morpholino-triggered gene inactivation appears to be a useful method to study the functional role of genes in preimplantation development.