Introduction The gestation length for the Old World camelids is 13 months. In all mammalian species the embryo starts life as a spherical clump of cells enclosed within a mucopolysaccharide coat, the zona pellucida, which is transparent, tough and elastic. The transformation from this stage (called a morula) to a blastocyst usually occurs soon after the embryo has reached the uterine lumen from...

Embryo implantation is essential for mammalian pregnancy, which involves intricate cross-talk between the blastocyst and the maternal endometrium. Recent advances have identified various molecules crucial to implantation and endometrial receptivity, including leukemia inhibitory factor, calcitonin, and homeobox A10. There is a close relationship between implantation and inflammation. Lipoxins, ...

There is increasing evidence that even before implantation, human development is regulated by embryonically and maternally derived growth factors. Studies in other mammalian species have shown that growth factors and their receptors are expressed by the preimplantation embryo and the reproductive tract. Furthermore, a number of growth factors have been shown to affect rate of embryo development...

We developed an air-liquid interphase culture procedure for mammalian oviduct epithelial cells leading to the formation of functional epithelial tissues, which generate oviduct fluid surrogates. These in vitro oviduct epithelia can be co-cultured with living zygotes and enable embryonic development up to the blastocyst stage without addition of embryo culture medium. The described strategy is b...

beta-Glucuronidase activity increases 60-fold from the 4-cell to the blastocyst stage during in vitro development of mouse preimplantation embryos, secondary to a 13-fold increase in beta-glucuronidase mRNA. Injections of antisense RNA from a beta-glucuronidase cDNA clone lacking the 5'-untranslated region and the coding sequences for approximately equal to 150 N-terminal amino acids were effec...

A critical event in mammalian embryo development is construction of an inner cell mass surrounded by a trophoectoderm (a shell of cells that later form extraembryonic structures). We utilize multi-scale, stochastic modeling to investigate the design principles responsible for robust establishment of these structures. This investigation makes three predictions, each supported by our quantitative...

Junction-mediating and regulatory protein (JMY) is a regulator of both transcription and actin filament assembly. JMY is a critical nucleation-promoting factor (NPF); however, its role in the development of mammalian embryos is poorly understood. In the current study, we investigated the functional roles of the NPF JMY in porcine embryos. Porcine embryos expressed JMY mRNA and protein, and JMY ...

Pluripotency and self renewal are the two primary characteristics of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) [1]-[4]. Pluripotency refers to the capacity of a single cell to give rise to any cell type of an embryo or an adult animal [5],[6]. A mammalian organism is developed from a single fertilized egg, the zygote, in an extremely ordered and error-proof fashion [7]. The zygote and the subsequent 2 to 4...

in vitro maturation (ivm) is emerging as a popular technology at the forefront of fertility treatment and preservation. however, standard in vitro culture conditions usually increase reactive oxygen species (ros), which have been implicated as one of the major causes for reduced embryonic developmental competence. it is well-known that higher than physiological levels of ros triggers granulosa ...

background: progress achieved in culture media formulations have resulted led to an improvement in maintaining the mammalian embryo in culture throughout the preimplantation and pre-attachment period. objective: the objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of various concentrations of myo-inositol during in vitro fertilization of bovine oocytes on subsequent embryo development. materi...