the objective of this study was to compare the effectiveness of various combination activators of bovine oocyte following intracytoplasmic sperm injection (icsi) in terms of cleavage and embryo development. bovine icsi oocytes were treated with a variation of treatments of combined or single activators as follows; 30 v for 15 x 2 μsec of electrical pulse +10 μg/ml cycloheximide (chx),7% ethanol...

Background: The success of in vitro-fertilization (IVF) cycles is determined large part by the quality embryo cleavage, which turn, dependent on culture media (CM). Many factors can influence CM, one levels Cell Free Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Understanding association between Cell-free DNA CM and cleavage could help improve IVF techniques.
 Methods: This prospective study was conducted ...

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...

Assisted human reproduction is characterized by a high variability in results regarding pregnancy and birth rates. In fact, in a cohort of fertilized oocytes from the same stimulation cycle, the development rate varies drastically, even though produced at the same time and under similar conditions. This variability results in large differences in implantation potential of human embryos develope...

BACKGROUND Embryos selection is crucial to maintain high performance in terms of pregnancy rate, reducing the risk of multiple pregnancy during IVF. Pronuclear and nucleolar characteristics have been proposed as an indicator of embryo development and chromosomal complement in humans, providing information about embryo viability. METHODS To correlate the zygote-score with the maternal age and ...

BACKGROUND Peritoneal fluid (PF) from patients with endometriosis can inhibit early embryo development via probable functional changes of embryo mitochondria in the early stage of embryo development. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of PF from patients with endometriosis on mitochondrial function and development of early mouse embryos. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS PF wa...

STUDY QUESTION Which embryo score variables are most powerful for predicting live birth after single embryo transfer (SET) at the early cleavage stage? SUMMARY ANSWER This large prospective study of visual embryo scoring variables shows that blastomere number (BL), the proportion of mononucleated blastomeres (NU) and the degree of fragmentation (FR) have independent prognostic power to predic...

Despite efforts made to improve the in vitro embryo culture conditions used during assisted reproduction procedures, human embryos must adapt to different in vitro oxygen concentrations and the new metabolic milieu provided by the diverse culture media used for such protocols. It has been shown that the embryo culture environment can affect not only cellular metabolism, but also gene expression...

A cytoplasmic component(s), previously shown to rescue the 'blocked' 2-cell mouse embryo in vitro, has been demonstrated to peak in activity during the transition between G2 and M phase and decline thereafter. The possible significance of this component(s) in the regulation of cleavage of the cultured mouse embryo is discussed.