Delay in development and behavioural abnormalities in the absence of p53 in zebrafish

Delay in development and behavioural abnormalities in the absence of p53 in zebrafish.
Elabd S, Jabeen NA, Gerber V, Peravali R, Bourdon JC, Kancherla S, Vallone D, Blattner C.
PLoS One. 2019 Jul 19;14(7):e0220069. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220069. eCollection 2019.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220069

This paper reports changes in developmental timing and behavior of p53-/- mutant embryos. While previous reports had suggested that p53 is dispensable for zebrafish development, the story might not be so simple. Previously a p53 knockdown was expected to produce an essentially wild-type embryo, but on the basis of this new work the results of Morpholino co-injection with p53 Morpholinos should be interpreted cautiously for contributions to the observed phenotype due to lack of p53. Still, given the gross abnormalities of an embryo in which the p53 apoptotic response is triggered by a knockdown, eliminating these abnormalities by a concurrent p53 knockdown is likely to remain a valuable technique for revealing gene function.