The two principal functions of ovarian follicles are developmental and endocrine. The cumulus cells surrounding the oocyte are specialized to serve the development of the oocyte and steroidogenesis is a principal role of mural granulosa cells that line the follicle wall. The findings in this report demonstrate that oocytectomy or treatment with an inhibitor of SMAD2/3 activation results in decr...

The kinesin-13 motor, KLP10A, destabilizes microtubules at their minus ends in mitosis and binds to polymerizing plus ends in interphase, regulating spindle and microtubule dynamics. Little is known about kinesin-13 motors in meiosis. In this study, we report that KLP10A localizes to the unusual pole bodies of anastral Drosophila melanogaster oocyte meiosis I spindles as well as spindle fibers,...

Production of functional eggs requires meiosis to be coordinated with developmental signals. Oocytes arrest in prophase I to permit oocyte differentiation, and in most animals, a second meiotic arrest links completion of meiosis to fertilization. Comparison of oocyte maturation and egg activation between mammals, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Drosophila reveal conserved signaling pathways and reg...

DYRKs are kinases that self-activate in vitro by autophosphorylation of a YTY motif in the kinase domain, but their regulation in vivo is not well understood. In C. elegans zygotes, MBK-2/DYRK phosphorylates oocyte proteins at the end of the meiotic divisions to promote the oocyte-to-embryo transition. Here we demonstrate that MBK-2 is under both positive and negative regulation during the tran...

Background: Artificial oocyte activation (AOA) has important implications in assisted reproductive technique (ART) with particular importance in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Parthenogenesis activation using zona- free oocytes offers an alternative model that could be applied to develop protocols for the activation of reconstructed embryos for cloning. Materials and Methods: To establis...

Fertilisation by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a technique that bypasses the membrane fusion of the gametes, has been widely used to produce offspring in humans and mice. Success with this technique has lent support to the hypothesis that in mammalian fertilisation, a factor from the sperm, the so-called sperm factor, is responsible for oocyte activation and that the fusion process i...

Background: The developmental competency of embryos is affected by several factors, including the developmental pathways and their elements. In mammalian species including goat, fertilized oocyte undergoes several divisions to form a structure called blastocyst. These events depend on the successful control of temporal and spatial expression of genes involved in genome activation. One of the cr...