With the aid of new technologies, science has found creative ways to investigate nature. Through the use of a highly sensitive, low-noise, cooled camera, previously applied to exploring dark sky, scientific laboratories around the world have been looking at the weak emission of light from cells in a living organism. Biophoton emission, as so-called by Fritz Albert Popp, was introduced to scienc...

The 'ESHRE Guidelines for Good Practice in IVF Laboratories' were drawn up by the Special Interest Group (SIG) in Embryology and published in the year 2000, and since then they constitute the minimal requirements for any laboratory offering assisted reproduction techniques (ART). In the understanding that the embryologist has a responsibility for the correct and justified application of ART in ...

In zoology it is well known that birds are characterized by the presence of feathers, and mammals by hairs. Another common point of view is that avian scales are directly related to reptilian scales. As a skin embryologist, I have been fascinated by the problem of regionalization of skin appendages in amniotes throughout my scientific life. Here I have collected the arguments that result from c...

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) has become a standard intervention for couples with infertility problems, especially as ART is highly successful and overall carries low risks [1,2]. The number of infants born following ART has increased steadily worldwide, with more than 5,000,000 so far [3]. In industrialized countries, 1–4% of newborns have been conceived by using ART [4,5], probably o...

BACKGROUND Previously manual human embryology in many in vitro fertilization (IVF) centers is rapidly being replaced by closed embryo incubation systems with time-lapse imaging. Whether such systems perform comparably to manual embryology in different IVF patient populations has, however, never before been investigated. We, therefore, prospectively compared embryo quality following closed syste...

Abstract Study question TESE is widely used for obstructive azoospermia (OA) as a surgical method sperm retrieval, but it benefiting the patient? Summary answer Since MESA-ICSI has very good fertilization rate, clinical pregnancy rate and delivery MESA should be employed OA subjects, not TESE. What known already micro-TESE are technically simple, retrieval surgery because they do require micros...

swims ‘upside down’, suggested – at least to him – not a vertebrate ancestor but, like the ascidian tadpole, an evolutionary simplified or ‘degenerate’ fish. Anton Dohrn was convinced that annelids were the ancestors of chordates. He suggested that structures could evolve through time leading to a complete change in their structural and functional identity. In his argument for annelid ancestry,...

tau.amegroups.com © Translational Andrology and Urology. All rights reserved. It is an honour to write the foreword to this focused issue of TAU on sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF). From my time as a first generation embryologist in the early days at the University of Cambridge with Professor Robert Edwards and in my current role at the London Women’s Clinic, I have become acutely aware of the num...

BACKGROUND IVF is a costly treatment option for women, their partners, and the public. Therefore new therapies that improve reproductive and health outcomes are highly desirable. There is a growing body of research evaluating the effect of acupuncture administered during IVF, and specifically on the day of embryo transfer (ET). Many trials are heterogeneous and results inconsistent. There remai...

considered the central issue of developmental biology. Most embryologists have been drawn to the field by the Whether studied at the tissue, cell, or molecular level, beauty of the developing embryo and the mystery of progress requires reliable knowledge of two closely reits structure emerging from a single fertilized egg. The lated topics: the fate map of the embryo and the cell classic public...