Backgrounds: A straight-forward way to identify whether a drug or environmental chemical can be harmful to unborn baby is to evaluate its effect on laboratory animals. All invivo methods need large number of animal and are therefore time consuming and expensive. However, the thousands of chemicals in need of testing, to reduce the spending of live animals, an assortment of in vitro assays has ...

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...

The inconsistency of efficiency in murine embryonic stem cell (ESC) production might be associated with the differences in preparation and cryopreservation of the feeder cell layer. As the cryopreservation of mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) declined the quality of MEF as feeder cell layer, an effective protocol should be determined to produce murine ESC on frozen-thawed feeder cell layer as ef...

Intercellular communication via gap junctions is thought to play an important role in embryonic cell survival and differentiation. Classical studies demonstrated both dye and electrical coupling of cells in the inner cell mass of mouse embryos, as well as the development of restrictions against coupling between cells of the inner cell mass and surrounding trophectoderm. Here we demonstrate exte...

objective(s): sertoli cells support in vivo germ cell production; but, its exact mechanism has not been well understood. the present study was designed to analyze the effect of sertoli cells in differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells (mescs) to germ cells.   materials and methods: a fusion construct composed of a stra8 gene promoter and the coding region of enhanced green fluorescence pro...

How cell fate becomes restricted during somatic cell differentiation is a long-lasting question in biology. Epigenetic mechanisms not present in pluripotent cells and acquired during embryonic development are expected to stabilize the differentiated state of somatic cells and thereby restrict their ability to convert to another fate. The histone variant macroH2A acts as a component of an epigen...

objective: it is hypothesized that stem cells have the capability to form tumors after transplantation. spermatogonial stem cells have proliferation potency and colonization ability related to express pluripotency genes such as c-myc. the primary aim of this study is to investigate tumorigenicity ability of these cells after in vitro cultivation and inoculation in athymic animals. methods: sper...

Introduction: The aim of this study was evaluate the ability of notochord to induce neural induction and/or differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cell to neuron and motor neuron, respectively. Methods: In order to produce embryoid bodies, ES cells line Royan B1 were grown in suspension in the absence of LIF for 4 days. EBs were divided into 4 groups. EBs in group 1 & 2 were further cultur...