The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects injectable selenium, vitamin E and B1 compounds on serum metabolic profile pregnancy rates (PR) during non-breeding season in Merino ewes that were synchronized with progesterone equine chorionic gonadotrophin (eCG). Thermographic monitoring last day synchronization successful early selection be used artificial insemination its relationshi...

Merino sheep in Australia experience periods of variable feed supply. Merino sheep can be bred to be more resilient to this variation by losing less BW when grazing poor quality pasture and gaining more BW when grazing good quality pasture. Therefore, selection on BW change might be economically attractive but correlations with other traits in the breeding objective need to be known. The geneti...

Transplacental transmission of bluetongue virus has been shown previously for the North European strain of serotype 8 (BTV-8) and for tissue culture or chicken egg-adapted vaccine strains but not for field strains of other serotypes. In this study, pregnant ewes (6 per group) were inoculated with either field or rescued strains of BTV-2 and BTV-8 in order to determine the ability of these virus...

Reproductive abnormalities cause major losses of sheep production. Abattoir materials were used todetermine the extent of reproductive wastage. Reproductive tracts were collected from 524 ewes slaughtered at Urmia slaughter-house in Urmia, northwest of Iran, during a period of 12 months. Overall, 30.10% of the ewes examined were pregnant. A total of 149 (28.44%) tracts developed acquired reprod...

To determine if a transient increase in uterine blood flow (BF) and estradiol-17 beta (E2 beta) secretion occurs during maternal recognition of pregnancy in ewes (as previously observed for sows and cows), 40 nonpregnant (NP) ewes were assigned in equal numbers to surgery on d 9, 11, 13 or 15 postestrus (d 0 = day of estrus). For 20 NP ewes (five/day), each uterine horn (UH) was flushed with sa...

The ovarian response to a standard chronogest + eCG treatment with plasma levels of insulin, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), thyroids, non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA), βOH-butyrate (BHB) and urea-N (PUN) was studied in lactating Awassi ewes (n = 105) during the late-summer – early autumn transition period. The ewes were inseminated with diluted fresh semen after gestagen removal, and ma...

The effects of pregnancy and undernutrition on endometrial gene expression were investigated in ewes fed all or half their maintenance requirements and killed on Day 14 of pregnancy or of the oestrous cycle. The endometrial expression of progesterone, oestrogen, oxytocin and interferon receptors (PR, ERalpha, OXTR and IFNAR, respectively), cyclo-oxygenase (COX)-2, proliferating cell nuclear ant...

Interferon-tau (IFNT) is secreted by the conceptus trophoblast and signals pregnancy recognition in ruminants. IFNT regulates expression of genes in the endometrium, peripheral blood leukocytes (PBLs), and corpus luteum (CL). Microarray analysis identified that expression of (chemosensory) receptor transporter protein 4 (RTP4) increased in PBLs during early pregnancy in cows. In the present stu...

A comparative study of the Rose Bengal test (RBT), Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) and complement fixation test (CFT) was performed to analyze sera of two Awassi flocks. Flock A was composed of 215 ewes, naturally infected with brucellosis. None of the animals were vaccinated. Flock B consisted of 336 non-infected non-vaccinated ewes. These served as negative controls. The two flocks ...