Differential gene expression in bovine elongated (Day 17) embryos produced by somatic cell nucleus transfer and in vitro fertilization

Embryo splitting affects the transcriptome during elongation stage of in vitro–produced bovine blastocysts

“…Lipid transporter activity and intrinsic components of membranes were the molecular function and cellular components affected the most. Our results are in concordance with other transcriptome analysis of elongated embryos, which showed in general similar deregulation of biological processes, molecular functions and cellular components, although using other experimental models and design [12,13,18,52].…”

“…Embryo collection was performed as previously standardized in our laboratory [13]. Uteri were flushed with 50-mL ice-cold Dulbecco PBS, supplemented with 6% BSA Fraction V in caudal to cranial direction.…”

“…However, embryo scoring based on visual classification is subjective. It is well known that even grade I embryos are often unable to maintain a normal pregnancy [10][11][12][13][14][15]. This might be caused by the diverse molecular signatures among embryos with dissimilar developmental capacity that result in different patterns of gene expression and finally in altered metabolism [16].…”

“…Thus, studying gene expression at this stage is crucial, although technically difficult, due to the lack of appropriate IVC systems and inaccessibility to in vivo elongating conceptus. An alternative option is to assess blastocyst development after transfer and recovering these embryos on Days 14 to 17 of development [13,19,21,23]. Elongated embryo provides important information of embryonic loss and can be used as a research model to evaluate the intrinsic quality of IVP embryos [18].…”

The embryonic stress response to in vitro culture: insight from genomic analysis

“…A histone-modifying enzyme under TGFB1 stimulation targets the PLOD2 promoter (Gjaltema et al 2015). Overexpression of IFN-t is associated with epigenetic reprogramming after somatic cell nuclear transfer in bovine elongated embryos (Rodriguez-Alvarez et al 2010). In addition, IFN-t and IGF2 are regulated differently in slow-developing and fast-developing embryos (Gutierrez-Adan et al 2004) and altered parental imprinting of IGF2 in embryonic stem cells is associated with aberrant development (Dean et al 1998).…”