Interest in oocyte cryopreservation has recently increased with the growing importance of in vitro embryo production, nuclear transfer, and gene banking (Gordon, 1997; Andrus et al., 2000). A relatively recent approach to achieve rapid freezing without the use of expensive freezing devices is called vitrification. Vitrification is defined as the physical process by which a highly concentrated s...

The survival of various cells subjected to low temperature exposure is higher when they are cooled slowly. This increase is consistent with the view that slow cooling decreases the probability of intracellular freezing by permitting water to leave the cell rapidly enough to keep the protoplasm at its freezing point. The present study derives a quantitative relation between the amount of water i...

Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy are applied to characterize the nonfreezable water molecules in fully hydrated D2O/sphingomyelin at temperatures below 0 degrees C. Upon cooling, DSC thermogram displays two thermal transitions peaked at -11 and -34 degrees C. The high-temperature exothermic transition corresponds to the freezing of the bu...

This study aimed to investigate the effect of storage at ?3 °C on myofibrillar protein in fast or slow frozen pork. Five pork loins 48 h post-mortem were subjected either (cold metal plate/?80 °C) freezing (still air/?20 followed by for 0, 1, 3, and 7 days before thawing. Freezing rate significantly influenced proteins within 3 °C, evidenced higher thaw loss, surface hydrophobicity reduced wate...