Cryopreservation is known for its marked deleterious effects on embryonic health. Bovine compact morulae were vitrified or slow-frozen, and post-warm morulae were cultured to the expanded blastocyst stage. Blastocysts developed from vitrified and slow-frozen morulae were subjected to microarray analysis and compared with blastocysts developed from unfrozen control morulae for differential gene ...

The POU (Pit-Oct-Unc)-domain transcription factor, Oct-4, has become a useful marker of pluripotency in the mouse. It is found exclusively in mouse preimplantation-stage embryos after embryonic genome activation and is a characteristic of mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells, and its absence in knockout mice precludes inner cell mass (ICM) formation in blastocysts. Expression of Oct-4 has also been ...

Much of the effect of heat stress on establishment and maintenance of pregnancy involves changes in ovarian function and embryonic development that reduce the competence of the oocyte to be fertilized and the resultant embryo to develop. There are three possible therapeutic approaches to manipulate the connection between hyperthermia and cellular responses to elevated temperature to improve fer...

Currently in vitro culture of mouse preimplantation embryos has become a very important technique to investigate different mechanisms of early embryogenesis. However, there is a big difference in the preimplantation development between mammalian species. Despite close relatedness to mice, in vitro cultivation of rat preimplantation embryos is still delicate and needs further investigation and o...

Melatonin is a unique multifunctional molecule that mediates reproductive functions in animals. In this study, we investigated the effects of melatonin on bovine parthenogenetic and androgenetic embryonic development, oocyte maturation, the reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels in parthenogenetic and androgenetic embryos and cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) hormone secretion with melatonin supple...

Factor in the germline alpha (FIGLA) is an oocyte-specific basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor essential for primordial follicle formation and expression of many genes required for folliculogenesis, fertilization and early embryonic survival. Here we report the characterization of bovine FIGLA gene and its regulation during early embryogenesis. Bovine FIGLA mRNA expression is restricted...

Thermal tolerance shapes organisms' physiological performance and limits their biogeographic ranges. Tropical terrestrial organisms are thought to live very near their upper thermal tolerance limits, and such small thermal safety factors put them at risk from global warming. However, little is known about the thermal tolerances of tropical marine invertebrates, how they vary across different li...

improvements on embryo micromanipulation techniques led to the use of embryo biopsy in commercial embryo transfer programs for genetic analysis of preimplantation bovine embryos. the aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of bovine blastocyst derived from embryos biopsied at different precompacted morulae stages by assessment of cryosurvivability of the resulting blastocysts. the in vitr...

WW domain-containing transcription regulator 1 (WWTR1) is one of the primary effectors in Hippo pathway, which plays essential roles cell differentiation into trophectoderm (TE) and inner mass lineages at blastocyst stage. However, little known about WWTR1 preimplantation development. The present study aimed to explore significance expression development using an mRNA knockdown (KD) system bovi...

BACKGROUND Arresting at a certain stage of development like the two-cell stage could be one of the causes of infertility. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of ethanol and strontium on growth and development of mice embryos arrested at the two-cell stage. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this experimental study, female mice were coupled with a male following superovulation. Positive vag...