Culturing two‐ to eight‐cell caprine embryos using domestic chicken eggs

Abstract

Early-stage caprine embryos were placed in the chick embryo amnion to determine if this culture method would support the development of embryos from a farm animal species. Following superovulation and natural mating, two- to eight-cell embryos were surgically collected from crossbred donor goats. Embryos were allotted to in vitro culture treatments across two different experiments (EXP). In EXP-I, embryos allotted to Treatment A (control) were cultured in Ham's F-10 with 10% fetal calf serum and 1% antibiotic-antimycotic (HF-10). Embryos in Treatment B were placed on a bovine fetal uterine fibroblast monolayer in HF-10, embryos allotted to Treatment C were agarose embedded and injected into the amniotic cavity of a day-4 chick embryo and those placed in Treatment D were co-cultured in HF-10 with day-15 caprine trophoblastic vesicles. In EXP II Treatments A, B, and C were the same; however Treatment D was omitted. EXP-I and EXP-II also differed in that chick embryo co-culture was for 72 hr in EXP-I but was extended to 96 hours in EXP-II. Additionally, the monolayer co-culture was limited to 96 hr in EXP-II; whereas, embryos in EXP-I remained on monolayer culture for 96 hr plus an additional 72 hr for subsequent embryo evaluation. Results indicate that the amniotic cavity of the developing chick embryo enhanced the development of two- to eight-cell caprine embryos through to hatching blastocysts when compared with that of the control medium alone.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Role of platelet-derived growth factor in development of in vitro matured and in vitro fertilized bovine embryos

“…Culture systems, such as uterine fibroblasts (Voelkel et al, 1985;Wiemer et al, 1988), and epithelial cells (Goodeaux et al, 1990), oviduct cells (Gandolfi and Moor, 1987;Rexroad and Powell, 1988;Ellington et al, 1989;Eyestone and First, 1989;McCaffery et al, 1991), trophoblastic vesicles (Camous et al, 1984;Heyman et al, 1987;Pool et al, 1988), granulosa cells (Fukuda et al, 1990;Zhang et al, 1992), chick embryo amnion (Blakewood et al, 1989;Blakewood et al, 1990) and conditioned medium (Eyestone and First, 1989;Eyestone et al, 1991;Pinyopummintr and Bavister, 1991), have allowed researchers to study embryonic development in farm animal species during pro¬ longed in vitro culture. Although the beneficial effects of co-culture systems have been demonstrated by many different laboratories in recent years, the biochemical components and "Present address: Agriculture Canada Research Station, Brandon, Manitoba R7A 5Y3, Canada.…”