BACKGROUND The channel-forming antimicrobial peptide, magainin-2-amide, interacts preferentially with negatively charged, non cholesterol-containing membranes, including those of sperm, oocytes and cells of pre-implantation embryos. Cyclodextrin and albumin remove membrane cholesterol and together with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) are potential enhancers of embryotoxicity. METHODS Two-cell murine...

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been a focus of attention due to their possible applications in medicine, by serving as scaffolds for cell growth and proliferation and improving mesenchymal cell transplantation and engraftment. The emphasis on the benefits of CNTs has been offset by the ample debate on the safety of nanotechnologies. In this study, we determine whether functionalized multiwalled C...

abstractalthough the biokinetics, metabolism, and chemical toxicity of uranium are well known, until recently little attention was paid to the potential toxic effects of uranium on reproduction and development in mammals. in recent years, it has been shown that uranium is a developmental toxicant when given orally or subcutaneously (sc) to mice. decreased fertility, embryo/fetal toxicity includ...

The embryotoxicity of the antimalarial drug chloroquine (CQ) was evaluated in vitro using the rat whole embryo culture system. CQ was found to be embryotoxic and dysmorphogenic when added directly to the culture media containing gestational day (GD) 10 rat conceptuses. Twenty-six-hr exposure to CQ elicited dose-related decreases in embryonic crown-rump length, protein and DNA contents and incre...

Rat postimplantation whole-embryo culture (WEC) is a promising alternative test for the assessment of developmental toxicity. Toxicogenomic-based approaches may improve the predictive ability of the WEC model by providing a means to identify compound-specific mechanistic responses associated with embryotoxicity in vivo. Furthermore, alterations in gene expression may serve as a sensitive, objec...

One of the model system that is included in the battery of tests for in vitro embryotoxicity studies is Micromass test. However, this test is based on the rat embryo limb bud cell culture and disregards other tissues. The aim of this work was to optimize culture condition and to check the influence of initial cell density and spot volume plated on the evaluation of embryotoxicity. Two model com...

This paper evaluates in vivo predictability of a battery of in vitro tests covering developmental toxicity and embryotoxicity of five widely used conazole fungicides. The conazoles were investigated in the embryonic stem cell test, and data were compared to in vivo embryotoxicity data. The same conazoles were evaluated on the basis of data from a battery of cell assays for endocrine activity, i...

There is a necessity to develop in vitro methods for testing embryotoxicity (Romero et al., 2015) [1]. We studied the progress of D3 mouse embryonic stem cells differentiation exposed to model embryotoxicants and non-embryotoxicants chemicals through the expression of biomarker genes. We studied a set of 16 different genes biomarkers of general cellular processes (Cdk1, Myc, Jun, Mixl, Cer and ...