The ultrastructural analysis of oocytes and ovarian follicles has been used to evaluate the effects of assisted reproductive techniques, such as cryopreservation or in vitro oocyte maturation. It also benefits the understanding of such complex mechanisms that occur during folliculogenesis. From the beginning of primordial follicles growth until oocyte maturation in preovulatory follicles oocyte...

Longitudinal studies of senescence accumulate rapidly from natural populations. However, it is largely unknown whether different fitness components senesce in parallel, how reproductive and survival senescence contribute to declines in reproductive value, and how large the fitness cost of senescence is (the difference between the observed reproductive value and the hypothetical reproductive val...

This Article discusses potential policies regarding assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). The initial question is whether ARTs should be viewed as private matters or as issues that affect overall social good. The author explains that this question may be answered by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the principles of procreative liberty. He then examines Supreme Court decisions regardi...

Supplementation of wild populations with captive-bred organisms is a common practice for conservation of threatened wild populations. Yet it is largely unknown whether such programmes actually help population size recovery. While a negative genetic effect of captive breeding that decreases fitness of captive-bred organisms has been detected, there is no direct evidence for a carry-over effect o...

The reproductive techniques of potential use to goat breeders have been developed in other species, notably the sheep, and have been applied to goats with only minor modifications necessitated by species differences. The Angora industry, and to a lesser extent the cashmere industry, have lent themselves readily to the relatively widespread use of reproductive techniques because of three major f...

This study in north east Scotland has shown that Marfan syndrome has a minimal birth incidence of 1:9802 live births, a minimal prevalence of 1:14217, and that 8/30 (26.7%) of cases in our series are new mutations. The calculated mutation rate is 15 +/- 6.7 x 10(-6) and there is evidence of reduced reproductive fitness.

In some organisms longevity, growth, and developmental rate are improved when they are maintained on a light/dark cycle, the period of which "resonates" optimally with the period of the endogenous circadian clock. However, to our knowledge no studies have demonstrated that reproductive fitness per se is improved by resonance between the endogenous clock and the environmental cycle. We tested th...

Sunni Islam has no supreme legal authority and disagreement by doctors of Islamic law over all issues not clarified by Islamic law is physiological. This is the case with Medically Assisted Reproduction: after an initially critical attitude, tolerance, limited exclusively to homologous practices, is spreading, whilst recourse to heterologous practices is considered on a par with adultery or for...

Despite the arrival of newer imaging modalities, the increase of laparoscopic surgical techniques and the application of subservient reproductive techniques, hysterosalpingography remains one of the main radiological methods for the investigation of female infertility. The purpose of this article is to pictorially present the spectrum of pathological findings revealed with hysterosalpingography.