Influence of transforming growth factor-α, insulin-like growth factor-II, epidermal growth factor or follicle stimulating hormone on in vitro development of preantral follicles in sheep

Steady-state level of epidermal growth factor (EGF) mRNA and effect of EGF on in vitro culture of caprine preantral follicles

“…EGF is considered a mitogenic factor for granulosa cells (Saha et al 2000;Wang et al 2007). It has been implicated in the regulation (Roy 1993;Campbell 1999) and stimulation of in vitro preantral follicle growth in hamsters (Roy 1993), mice (Boland and Gosden 1994), humans (Roy and Kole 1998), cows (Gutierrez et al 2000), sheep (Hemamalini et al 2003) and goats (Silva et al 2004a;Rajarajan et al 2006;Celestino et al 2009). EGF, when tested on in vitro cultures of pig preantral follicles, not only promoted a suppression of apoptosis in the granulosa cells, but also increased antrum formation (Mao et al 2004).…”

Quantitative expression of antiapoptotic and proapoptotic genes in sheep ovarian follicles grown in vivo or cultured in vitro

“…The ovaries were trimmed off adherent tissues and ligaments and washed twice in PBS supplemented with 50 mg/mL gentamycin sulfate. All the subsequent procedures were carried out in a laminar flow [13,[15][16][17][18][19].…”

In vitro culture of goat preantral follicles from fetal ovaries

“…However, among the individual concentrations of the growth factors and hormones, the extrusion of the oocytes from cultured PFs was observed only in GH or EGF supplemented medium (Table 1). There were reports that EGF, FSH, GH and IGF-I induced the growth of small and large PFs of adult sheep (Cecconi et al, 1999;Hemamalini et al, 2003;Tamilmani et al, 2005) and goats (Rajarajan et al, 2006;Matos et al, 2007;Martins et al, 2010;Saraiva et al, 2010Saraiva et al, , 2012Frota et al, 2011;Magalhaes et al, 2012). Similarly, in our earlier studies, T 4 , FSH, IGF-I and GH, individually or in combinations (T 4 + FSH; IGF-I + GH; T 4 + FSH; IGF-I + GH) supported better in vitro growth, antrum formation, extrusion of oocytes and subsequent maturation of oocytes from cultured adult sheep PFs (Arunakumari et al, 2007(Arunakumari et al, , 2010.…”

“…The present results showed that GH has more synergistic effect with EGF than IGF-I on antrum formation and extrusion of oocytes from cultured PFs ( Table 2). The earlier studies proposed that EGF might initiate the growth of adult sheep PFs, but requires other factors to sustain and/or complete the process (Hemamalini et al, 2003;Tamilmani et al, 2005). T 4 + FSH + GH combination might have played a role to complete the EGF initiated growth by increase in PFs diameter, antrum formation and extrusion of oocytes.…”