Conceptus losses in livestock occur throughout gestation. The uterus and the embryo-placenta-fetus play interconnected roles in these losses, the details of which depend on the period of gestation and the species. Studies in sheep and pigs have indicated that the uterine glands are essential for full fertility, based on experiments where gland development was reduced through the use of exogenou...

Background: The developmental competence of oocytes matured in vitro (IVM) is yet far below than in vivo counterparts. Recent studies suggest that the asynchrony between nuclear/cytoplasmic maturation and the initial low/heterogeneous quality of oocytes are the most important factors affecting IVM success. We investigated whether selection of growing oocytes (based on their glucose 6- phosphate...

Bluetongue (BT), a disease that affects mainly sheep, causes economic losses owing to not only its deleterious effects on animals but also its associated impact on the restriction of movement of livestock and livestock germplasm. The causative agent, bluetongue virus (BTV), can occur in the semen of rams and bulls at the time of peak viraemia and be transferred to a developing foetus. The risk ...

Establishment and maintenance of pregnancy results from signaling by the conceptus (embryo/fetus and associated extraembryonic membranes) and requires progesterone produced by the corpus luteum. In most mammals, hormones produced by the trophoblast maintain progesterone production by acting directly or indirectly to maintain the corpus luteum. In domestic animals (ruminants and pigs), hormones ...

Little information is available on transuterine embryonal migration in monotocous animals and anteroposterior orientation of fetuses in the uterus. This study was designed to determine the frequency of transuterine embryonal migration in sheep and anteroposterior orientation of sheep fetuses, pig fetuses and piglets at birth. The migration frequency of preimplantation sheep embryos was 4.0%. Th...

Copyrights: © 2017 Ortu Sebastiano. This is an Open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 1 Ortu Sebastiano, et al. Abstract This study aimed at comparing quantitative and qualitative results of experiments based on embryo cells (embryonic stem-like – ESL) relative to medullary stimulation (BMS) for chondral lesions treatment of Me...

While CRISPR/Cas9 technology has proven to be a valuable system to generate gene-targeted modified animals in several species, this tool has been scarcely reported in farm animals. Myostatin is encoded by MSTN gene involved in the inhibition of muscle differentiation and growth. We determined the efficiency of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to edit MSTN in sheep and generate knock-out (KO) animals with...