objective: the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of laser assisted hatching on the development and quality of vitrified-warmed 4-cell stage mouse embryos. materials and methods: the vitrified-warmed 4-cell mouse embryos were divided into two groups: control group (without laser assisted hatching) and experiment group (with laser assisted hatching). all embryos in both groups were ...

Background: At the outset of the somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) process, the chromatin structure of the somatic cell which governs its state of differentiation undergoes dramatic changes, called reprogramming, and is compelled back to the embryonic stage. However, the overall epigenetic makeup of the resultant cloned embryos has been acknowledged far different from the fertilized embryos....

Early-cleaving embryos are known to have better capacity to reach the blastocyst stage and produce better quality embryos compared to late-cleaving embryos. To investigate the significance of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress on early embryo cleavage kinetics and development, porcine embryos produced in vitro were separated into early- and late-cleaving groups and then cultured in the absence o...

Evaluation of quality and viability of bovine and rabbit preimplantation embryos following cryopreservation was the objective of this study. Bovine embryos of Holstein breed (n = 88) at the morula-early blastocyst stage (on the 7 day after the first insemination) and rabbit embryos (n = 135) from New Zealand breed at the morula stage (90–92 hpc) were cryopreserved by the two-step vitrification ...

professional firefighting is among the most demanding jobs. prior studies have showed the notable prevalence of poor sleep quality among professional firefighters that may result in catastrophes. the aim of this study was in field confirmation of zolpidem usage (10 mg/po/bed time) for short term management of poor sleeps quality among professional firefighters. in a double-blind, randomized, pl...

BACKGROUND Embryo quality may be accurately assessed as early as the pronuclear zygote phase, as shown in recent studies. However, it is not known whether good quality zygotes are destined to become good quality cleavage stage embryos and blastocysts. METHODS In this retrospective study, 86 intracytoplasmic sperm injection-embryo transfer cycles were studied where each available embryo was sc...