Assisted human reproduction is characterized by a high variability in results regarding pregnancy and birth rates. In fact, in a cohort of fertilized oocytes from the same stimulation cycle, the development rate varies drastically, even though produced at the same time and under similar conditions. This variability results in large differences in implantation potential of human embryos develope...

Background: Pregnancy involves a continuum of complex biological processes. Each of them can be affected by the environment surrounding the pregnant female (e. g. chemicals, nutrition, stress, infection) and data have focused on gametes quality, early blastocyst development and placental function and their perturbations by environmental insults or embryo biotechnologies. During the pregnancy pe...

objective: after the introduction of assisted reproductive techniques, human embryos were officially introduced into laboratories and now thousands of them are cryopreserved in such settings. embryonic stem cells and the future application of such cells in the treatment of disease opened the door to further research on human embryos. these developments raise many ethical issues, some of which h...

background: little is understood about the regulation of gene expression during early goat embryo development. this study investigated the expression profile of 19 genes, known to be critical for early embryo development in mouse and human, at five different stages of goat in vitro embryo development (oocyte, 8-16 cell, morula, day-7 blastocyst, and day 14 blastocyst). materials and methods: st...

Background Little is understood about the regulation of gene expression during early goat embryo development. This study investigated the expression profile of 19 genes, known to be critical for early embryo development in mouse and human, at five different stages of goat in vitro embryo development (oocyte, 8-16 cell, morula, day-7 blastocyst, and day 14 blastocyst). MaterialsAndMethods Stage-...

The renin-angiotensin system (RAS), mainly associated with the regulation of blood pressure, has been recently investigated in female reproductive organs and the developing foetus. Angiotensin II (Ang II) influences oviductal gamete movements and foetal development, but there is no information about RAS in the early embryo. The aim of this study was to determine whether RAS components are prese...

As part of successful human reproduction, the Fallopian tube must provide a suitable environment for pre-implantation development of the embryo and for efficient transport of the embryo to the uterus for implantation. These functions are coordinated by paracrine interactions between tubal epithelial, smooth muscle and immune cells and the cells of the developing embryo. Alterations in these sig...

the success rate of several advanced basic and clinical techniques in the field of mammalian biotechnology, including cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and assisted reproductive techniques (art) depends mainly on the success rate of pregnancy following in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer (ivfet). the techniques used in art have advanced considerably since the first in vitro fertil...