OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS To determine the effect of cochlear implantation on tinnitus perception in patients with severe bilateral postlingual sensorineural hearing loss and to demonstrate possible differences between unilateral and bilateral cochlear implantation. STUDY DESIGN Prospective study. METHODS Thirty-eight adult patients were included in this prospective study, as part of a multicen...

Oocyte maturation and embryo development are controlled by intra-ovarian factors such as steroid hormones. Progesterone (P4) exists in the follicular fluid that contributes to normal mammalian ovarian function and has several critical functions during embryo development and implantation, including endometrial receptivity, embryonic survival during gestation and transformation of the endometrial...

 Success of pregnancy depends on many factors. Three phenomena inducing immune tolerance against semi-allogeneic conceptus may play a crucial role in the pre-implantation period of pregnancy: influence of sex hormones in sex cycle, presence of oocyte or embryo and the presence of semen in the female reproductive tract. On the other hand dendritic cells are the most effective antigen-presenting ...

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are pluripotent cell lines that can be maintained indefinitely in an early developmental state. ESC culture conditions almost always require the cytokine LIF to maintain self-renewal. As ESCs are not homogeneous but contain multiple populations reminiscent of the blastocyst, identifying the target cells of LIF is necessary to understand the propagation of pluripotenc...

An understanding of oocyte and embryo metabolism is critical to understanding and developing in vitro culture systems. In the last 60-70 years there has been a constant evolution in the way metabolism studies have been conducted. This includes a change from studying the metabolism of the oocyte alone vs. as a whole cumulus oocyte complex. The study of in vivo environments has lead to the creati...

Cardiac septation defects are among the most common birth defects in humans. The frequency of these defects reflects the complexity of cardiogenesis, which involves such processes as cell proliferation, migration, differentiation, and morphogenetic interactions. Major advances in the understanding of the underlying genetic etiologies of cardiac septation defects have provided insight into the g...

Kruppel-like transcription factors (Klfs) are essential for the induction and maintenance of pluripotency of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), yet little is known about their roles in establishing the three lineages of the pre-implantation embryo. Here, we show that Klf5 is required for the formation of the trophectoderm (TE) and the inner cell mass (ICM), and for repressing primitive endoderm (PE) ...

Mouse pre-implantation development gives rise to the blastocyst, which is made up of at least three distinct cell types: the trophectoderm (TE) that surrounds a cavity, and an inner cell mass (ICM) comprising the primitive endoderm (PE) and epiblast (EPI). However, the underlying mechanisms involved in patterning the cleavage-stage embryo are still unresolved. By analyzing the distribution of t...

Chromosomal aneuploidy is responsible for a significant proportion of pregnancy failures, whether conceived naturally or through in vitro fertilization (IVF). In an effort to improve the success rate of IVF, screening embryos for aneuploidy - or pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS) - has been proposed as a means of ensuring only euploid embryos are selected for transfer. Early PGS approache...

BACKGROUND E(epithelial)-cadherin is a vital cell adhesion protein that plays a critical role in morphogenesis. Previous studies of E-cadherin distribution in human embryos have produced equivocal results. METHODS Immunocytochemistry in conjunction with laser scanning confocal microscopy was used to detect E-cadherin in 97 human cleavage stage embryos and 35 blastocysts from normal and abnorm...