Leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF) is a pleiotrophic cytokine required for blastocyst implantation in mice. Uterine expression of LIF and that of its receptors has been demonstrated in a number of mammalian species indicating that LIF may have widespread importance in the establishment of pregnancy. The variations in the reaction of the uterus in preparation for and during implantation are consi...

Intercellular communication is essential to coordinate the behaviour of individual cells during organismal development. The preimplantation mammalian embryo is a paradigm of tissue self-organization and regulative development; however, the cellular basis of these regulative abilities has not been established. Here we use a quantitative image analysis pipeline to undertake a high-resolution, sin...

Transfer of human embryos at the blastocyst stage may offer considerable benefits including an increased implantation rate and a decreased risk of multiple pregnancies; however, blastocyst culture requires an efficient and reliable in-vitro embryo culture system. In this study, the effect of the Well-of-the-Well (WOW) system consisting of microwells formed on the bottom of the culture dish was ...

objective: vitrification has been shown as one of the most effective methods of cryopreservation for mammalian embryos. however, there is no consensus which stage of embryonic development is the most appropriate for vitrification with subsequent maximal development after thawing. this study was carried out to explore and compare the effect(s) of vitrification on mouse 2-cell, 4-cell, 8-cell, mo...

LKB1/PAR-4 is essential for the earliest polarization steps in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos and Drosophila oocytes. Although LKB1 (also known as STK11) is sufficient to initiate polarity in a single mammalian intestinal epithelial cell, its necessity in the formation and maintenance of mammalian epithelia remains unclear. To address this, we completely remove LKB1 from mouse embryos by genera...

introduction: mouse embryos can successfully be frozen with sucrose and propandiol. however, different developmental stages of mammalian embryos have shown to have various capacities to undergo freeze-thawing procedure. in the present study, the ability of 1,2,4 and 8-ell mouse embryo to tolerate the freeze-thawing procedure was investigated and the effect of this procedure on the further in vi...

The mammalian embryo is encased in a glycoproteinaceous coat, the zona pellucida (ZP) during preimplantation development. Prior to implantation, the blastocyst must undergo 'hatching' or ZP escape. In hamsters, there is a thinning of the ZP followed by a focal lysis and a complete dissolution of the ZP during blastocyst hatching. Earlier studies from our laboratory have indicated a role for cys...

background: embryonic stem cells (esc) are pluripotent cells which have been used as a model to study the mechanism that control the embryogenesis and early mammalian development in vitro. the aim of this study was to isolate and produce embryonic stem cells from late blastocyst stage embryos in mice. materials and methods: blastocyst stage embryos from pregnant nmri mice were obtained and cult...

The trophectoderm epithelium is the first differentiated cell layer to arise during mammalian development. Blastocyst formation requires the proper expression and localization of tight junction, polarity, ion gradient and H2O channel proteins in the outer cell membranes. However, the underlying transcriptional mechanisms that control their expression are largely unknown. Here, we report that tr...