Supplementation of spermidine, an autophagy-inducing agent, has been shown to protect against neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in aged animal models. The present translational study aimed to determine safety and tolerability of a wheat germ extract containing enhanced spermidine concentrations. In a preclinical toxicity study, supplementation of spermidine using this extract did not resu...

Background: The mammalian oocyte has the unique feature of supporting fertilization and normal development while being able of reprogramming the nuclei of somatic cells towards pluripotency, and occasionally even totipotency. Whilst oocyte quality is known to decay with somatic ageing, it is not a given that different biological functions decay concurrently. In this study, we tested whether ooc...

3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-CoA lyase (HL, EC 4.1.3.4) catalyses the last step of ketogenesis from leucine and fatty acids. HL deficiency in humans is one of the many inborn errors of CoA ester metabolism. By gene targeting, we created a strain of HL-deficient mice. Heterozygous HL-deficient mice are clinically normal and fibroblasts from homozygous HL-deficient embryos grow normally despite abs...

background: this study was designed to develop a new co-culture system, assess the effect of luteinizing hormone (lh) using sequential media to promote development and increase the quality of 2-cell murine embryos through the 8-16 cell stage to morula and blastocyst stages. materials and methods: monolayers for co-culture were prepared from ovine oviduct epithelial cells (ooec) in dmem/f12 medi...

The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that leptin can directly mediate the negative effect of maternal obesity on preimplantation embryos. As previously shown, maternal obesity retards early embryonic development in vivo and increases the incidence of apoptosis in blastocysts. When two-cell embryos isolated from control and obese mice were transferred to identical (leptin free...

Studies of mammalian tissue culture cells indicate that the conserved and distinct NDR isoforms, NDR1 and NDR2, play essential cell biological roles. However, mice lacking either Ndr1 or Ndr2 alone develop normally. Here, we studied the physiological consequences of inactivating both NDR1 and NDR2 in mice, showing that the lack of both Ndr1/Ndr2 (called Ndr1/2-double null mutants) causes embryo...

Inactivation of the murine tissue factor (TF) gene or tissue factor pathway inhibitor 1 (TFPI) gene results in embryonic lethality, indicating that both are required for embryonic development. We have shown that expression of low levels of TF from a transgene (hTF) rescues TF-null embryos. However, low-TF mice (mTF(-/-)/hTF+) have hemostatic defects in the uterus, placenta, heart, and lung. In ...

BACKGROUND Successful Embryo Transfer (ET) technique is a fateful step of all efforts to achieve live births from in vitro produced embryos in assisted reproductive techniques or in knockout, transgenic or cloned animal projects. Small reproductive tract of mice and limitation of current techniques may not well satisfy the requirements for mass production of genetically modified mice. Genetic a...