Reproduction Abstracts

Many studies demonstrating that the environment a pregnant female experiences can have profound and sometimes persistent effects on offspring development use extreme experimental perturbations which do not reflect the range of environments a pregnant female is actually likely to experience. We have assessed offspring reproductive development following treatments designed to reflect husbandry and management conditions that pregnant sheep or pigs encounter. Female offspring of s...

This study determined whether variation (representative of normal UK farm conditions) in pregnant ewe management is sufficient to alter the programing of the male reproductive axis. Between days 85 and 138 of pregnancy, twin-bearing ewes were managed to either mimic ‘poor husbandry’ (PH) with a high stocking density, reduced feeding space and repeated social mixing or according to ‘best practice’ (BP) with a lower stocking density, longer feed troughs, and ...

Low birth weight observed in the ‘runt’ piglet of the litter compared to its siblings has severe consequences for neonatal and adult development that cannot be remedied post-natally. This study compared the expression of a number of candidates hypothesised to be involved in angiogenesis and placental attachment in porcine endometrial samples.Endometrial tissues supplying the smallest and normal-sized foetuses were collected from large white lan...

In a previous study, following IVF, oocytes from gilts fed a high fibre diet for the first 19 days of their third oestrous cycle, produced blastocysts with more cells than oocytes from control-fed gilts. We hypothesise that FF protein composition is altered by the diet and that this confers the reproductive benefits.The current study compared the protein composition of pooled Day 19 FF from 12 high fibre-fed pigs and 12 control-fed pigs in search of biom...