In this investigation the effects of excess vitamin A administration during the early embryonic period were studied. Intramuscular injection of a single dose of 15000,20000 or 25000 IU/kg vitamin A to pregnant Balb/c strain mice on either day 7,8,9 or 10 of gestation (vaginal plug= day 0 of gestation) produced major malformations in the central nervous system (CNS) including exencephaly, h...

background: methamphetamine (ma) is one of most common illicit drugs which were reported that nearly half of ma consumers are women. ma can cross through placenta and affects pregnancy and fetus development. objective: our aim was to evaluate effects of injected ma on crown-rump length, head and placental circumference, body weight, histological changes and apoptosis in fetus. materials and met...

Failure of facial prominence fusion causes cleft lip and palate (CL/P), a common human birth defect. Several potential mechanisms can be envisioned that would result in CL/P, including failure of prominence growth and/or alignment as well as a failure of fusion of the juxtaposed epithelial seams. Here, using geometric morphometrics, we analyzed facial outgrowth and shape change over time in a n...

Establishment of the left-right axis is a fundamental process of vertebrate embryogenesis. Failure to develop left-right asymmetry leads to incorrect positioning and morphogenesis of numerous internal organs, and is proposed to underlie the etiology of several common cardiac malformations. The transcriptional modulator Cited2 is essential for embryonic development: Cited2-null embryos die durin...

Genetic polymorphisms are thought to play an important role in determining susceptibility to neural tube defects (NTDs), for example between different ethnic groups, but the embryonic manifestation of these polymorphic genetic influences is unclear. We have used a mouse model to test experimentally whether polymorphic variations in the pattern of cranial neural tube closure can influence suscep...

The early development of the exencephalic malformation in trisomy 12 (Tsl2) and trisomy 14 (Tsl4) mouse embryos was examined by means of scanning electron microscopy and compared with cranial neural tube formation in euploid litter-mates. Embryos from normal laboratory mice were used as additional controls. The euploid control embryos of the trisomy-inducing breeding system showed a slight dela...

BACKGROUND The cytoskeletal adaptor protein vinculin plays a fundamental role in cell contact regulation and affects central aspects of cell motility, which are essential to both embryonal development and tissue homeostasis. Functional regulation of this evolutionarily conserved and ubiquitously expressed protein is dominated by a high-affinity, autoinhibitory head-to-tail interaction that spat...

The ciliopathies are a group of heterogeneous diseases with considerable variations in phenotype for allelic conditions such as Meckel-Gruber syndrome (MKS) and Joubert syndrome (JBTS) even at the inter-individual level within families. In humans, mutations in TMEM67 (also known as MKS3) cause both MKS and JBTS, with TMEM67 encoding the orphan receptor meckelin (TMEM67) that localizes to the ci...

Glutathione (GSH) homeostasis is important during organogenesis. To elucidate the impact of GSH depletion in organogenesis stage embryos on oxidative stress and drug teratogenicity, l-buthionine-S,R-sulfoximine (BSO) was given to timed pregnant CD-1 mice 4 h before exposure to a model teratogen, hydroxyurea (HU) [400 mg/kg (HU-400) or 600 mg/kg (HU-600)]. Treatment with BSO or HU alone or with ...