background: there is no doubt that luteal phase support is essential to enhance the reproductive outcome in ivf cycles. in addition to progesterone and human chorionic gonadotropin, several studies have described gnrh agonists as luteal phase support to improve implantation rate, pregnancy rate and live birth rate, whereas other studies showed dissimilar conclusions. all of these studies have b...

Background: Normal growth of oocytes, embryos and also successful implantation depend on environmental factors such as the secretion of cumulus cells and composition of follicular and tubular fluids. Therefore, addition of serum, conditioned medium (CM) to the culture medium and also co-culture with somatic cells improve mammalian embryo development. So, in the respect to the secretion of diffe...

Embryo implantation is a crucial process for successful pregnancy. To date, the mechanism of embryo implantation remains unclear. Ezrin-radixin-moesin-binding protein-50-kDa (EBP50) is a scaffold protein, which has been shown to play an important role in cancer development. Embryo implantation and cancer follow a similar progression. Thus, in this article, we utilized immunohistochemical staini...

OBJECTIVE After the introduction of assisted reproductive techniques, human embryos were officially introduced into laboratories and now thousands of them are cryopreserved in such settings. Embryonic stem cells and the future application of such cells in the treatment of disease opened the door to further research on human embryos. These developments raise many ethical issues, some of which ha...

Implantation is a complex developmental process that involves an intimate “crosstalk” between the embryo and uterus. Synchronized development of the embryo to the blastocyst stage and differentiation of the uterus to the receptive state are essential to this process. Successful execution of the events of implantation involves participation of steroid hormones, locally derived growth factors, cy...

Insulin like growth factors (IGF-I and IGF-II) are expressed in embryos and reproductive tracts of several species including cow, sheep and swine. They are mitogenic and have endocrine, paracrine and autocrine function infusing cell division, blastocyst formation, implantation and embryo growth. Increase in embryo growth will probably result with a higher implantation rates leading to consequen...