Developmental competence of female gametes determines their maturation ability, successful fertilisation, and proper zygote formation. Oocyte quality may be assessed by expression profiling of several gene markers such as Cx43, TGFB, GDF9, BMP, Lox and Pdia5 that determine the biological features of oocytes. Conversely, several other extrinsic factors, including follicular size or heat shock ma...

Reduced oocyte and embryo quality are currently recognized as key factors in the problem of disappointing fertility in high producing dairy cows, but also in women undergoing assisted reproductive treatment. This review aims to highlight the importance of intrafollicular conditions in the subfertility problem, topical in both bovine and human research. Metabolic disturbances, like a negative en...

Background: Oocyte in vitro maturation success rate is still low in compareision to oocyte in vivo maturation. Thus prediction and improvement of oocyte competency are two critical issues in assisted reproductive technology. New insights into oocyte-cumulus cell regulatory loop may assist our optimization of in vitro maturation technique. Maturation and developmental competency of cumulus oocyt...

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a relatively long-lived signaling molecule that plays an essential role in oocyte maturation, implantation, as well as early embryonic development. Exposure to relatively high levels of H2O2 functions efficiently to accelerate oocyte aging and deteriorate oocyte quality. However, little precise information exists regarding intra-oocyte H2O2 concentrations, and its di...

If no fertilization occurs at an appropriate time after ovulation, oocyte quality deteriorates rapidly as a process called postovulatory aging. Because the postovulatory aging of oocytes has detrimental effects on embryo development and offspring, many efforts have been made to prevent oocyte aging. Here we showed that quercetin prevented the decline in oocyte quality during postovulatory aging...

abstract background: the intracytoplasmic sperm injection procedure ending with total fertilization failure is very distressfull event for both the clinician and the patient. objective: the aim of this study was to identify independent factors which could be used to identify total fertilization failure before the day of intracytoplasmic sperm injection. materials and methods: this was a retrosp...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association of individual follicular fluid (FF) leptin and adiponectin levels with the quality of the corresponding oocyte and embryo. METHODS We prospectively enrolled 67 women who underwent controlled ovarian hyperstimulation with 89 FF samples. FF and the corresponding oocyte was obtained from a single dominant preovulatory follicle at the time of oocyte retrie...

The aim of the study was to examine whether oocyte yield could be an indicator of morphological oocyte quality and biological competency in patients younger than 36 years undergoing controlled ovarian stimulation (COS). Three hundred and thirty-five intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedures were arbitrarily subdivided into five groups according to the number of retrieved oocytes. Patie...

OBJECTIVE To investigate fertilization and embryo quality of dysmorphic mature oocytes with specific morphological abnormalities obtained from intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). METHODS The fertilization rate (FR) and embryo quality were compared among 58 dysmorphic and 42 normal form oocytes (control 1) obtained from 35 consecutive ICSI cycles, each of which yielded at least one dysmor...

A major challenge in assisted reproductive technology is to develop conditions for in vitro oocyte maturation yielding high-quality eggs. Efforts are underway to assess whether known hormonal and local factors play a role in oocyte developmental competence and to identify the molecular mechanism involved. Here we have tested the hypothesis that FSH improves oocyte developmental competence by re...