Reproduction Abstracts

Obesity in females causes altered fetal growth during pregnancy and permanently ‘programs’ the metabolism of offspring; however the origin of these changes and whether they are reversible is not known. We now show that in obese female mice the oocytes exhibit endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, high levels of intracellular lipid, reduced Ptx3 matrix production and fail to ovulate. The oocytes from obese mice contain normal levels of mtDNA but have reduced mitochondria...

Chromatin remodeling factor chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 1 (CHD1) is a protein belonging to the family of ATPase dependent chromatin remodeling factors and recognizes tri-methylated lysine 4 of histone H3 (H3K4me3) in chromatin. Histone methylation is one of the epigenetic modifications involved in gene regulation and H3K4me3 is associated with a transcriptionally permissive state of chromatin. It has been shown that CHD1 facilitates pre-mRNA splicing, and is requ...

Introduction: Genome-wide analysis of DNA methylation in mammalian preimplantation embryos, particularly at the single embryo level, will be of particular use for assessing the epigenetic status and health of in vitro-derived embryos, including humans. To date, single embryo DNA methylation analysis has been limited to a small number of genes (<5). In this study we used an adaptation of reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) to i) perform genome-wide a...

Introduction: The mechanisms that dictate nucleus size are largely mysterious. Experiments in fission yeast suggest that nuclear size is dictated by the size of the cell, whereas studies in Xenopus indicate that nuclear import rates control nuclear volume. Here we set out to exploit the reductive divisions of early development present to what regulates nucleus size in mammalian embryos.Materials and methods: We generated three-dimensional confoc...

Pigs provide outstanding models of human genetic diseases due to the striking similarities to human anatomy, physiology and genetics. Pig induced pluripotent stem cells (piPSCs) have been generated for several years but the cloning efficiency using unsynchronized piPSCs was extremely low. Here, we reported a method to produce diploid cloned embryos from piPSCs which were synchronized to metaphase. The piPSCs cell line was established using a drug-inducible system and exhibit s...