Background: The beneficial effect of supplementing culture medium with melatonin has been reported during in vitro embryo development of species such as mouse, bovine and porcine. However, the effect of melatonin on the mouse somatic cell nuclear transfer remained unknown. Materials and Methods: In this study, we assessed the effects of various concentrations of melatonin (10-6 to 10-12 M) on t...

The continuous growth of the plant embryo is interrupted during the seed maturation processes which results in a dormant seed. The embryo continues development after germination when it grows into a seedling. The embryo growth phase starts after morphogenesis and ends when the embryo fills the seed sac. Very little is known about the processes regulating this phase. We describe mutants that aff...

Introduction: Women with poorly controlled insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) have a much higher incidence of early pregnancy complications, these include spontaneous miscarriages, early growth delay, and congenital malformations. Most of the investigations have been devoted to the early post implantation and organogenesis period of pregnancy. In this research we studied the hyperglycem...

The aim of this in vitro study was to test the effect of microinjection (Mi) of foreign gene into the rabbit egg pronucleus and epidermal growth factor (EGF) addition on the blastocyst rate, the cell number and the diameter of embryos, and to determine possible relationships between embryo cell number and embryo diameter. Blastocyst rate was significantly decreased in geneMi (G-Mi/E0) group (63...

background: melatonin, a reactive oxygen species (ros) scavenger and an antioxidant, has been shown that can inhibit apoptosis. administration of melatonin may improve embryo development in assisted reproductive technology (art). objective: the aim of this study was to evaluate the role of melatonin in inhibition of spontaneous and induced apoptosis by tumor necrosis factor alph (tnf-α) and act...

Developing Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) seeds and embryos represent a complex set of cell layers and tissues that mediate the transport and partitioning of carbohydrates, amino acids, hormones, and signaling molecules from the terminal end of the funicular phloem to and between these seed tissues and eventually to the growing embryo. This article provides a detailed analysis of the sympla...

Although the zebrafish possesses many characteristics that make it a valuable model for genetic studies of vertebrate development, one deficiency of this model system is the absence of methods for cell-mediated gene transfer and targeted gene inactivation. In mice, embryonic stem cell cultures are routinely used for gene transfer and provide the advantage of in vitro selection for rare events s...

Knowledge of single-cell metabolism would provide a powerful look into cell activity changes as cells differentiate to all the tissues of the vertebrate embryo. However, single-cell mass spectrometry technologies have not yet been made compatible with complex three-dimensional changes and rapidly decreasing cell sizes during early development of the embryo. Here, we bridge this technological ga...

background: using cellular phone has rapidly increased all over the world. also, the concern on the possible health hazards of electromagnetic fields (emf) induced from cell phones to reproduction has been growing in many countries. the aim of this study was to assess the consequences and effects of exposure to the cell phone radiation on the quality and survival rates of preimplantation embryo...