Study on the role of zona pellucida in pre- and post-implantation development of mouse embryos [an abstract of entire text]

概要

The zona pellucida (ZP) plays various roles in embryonic development both in vivo and in vitro. The use of assisted zona hatching by physical cutting or enzyme-treated partial thinning of ZP is widely used for improving the pregnancy rate of human and bovine embryos after embryo transfer (ET). Recently, the zona pellucida removal (ZPR) is also applied for the early embryonic cleavage stage and is mostly used for blastomere separation for producing identical multiplets such as twins and quadruplets combined with genomic analysis, somatic cell nuclear transfer clones, chimeric animals, and improving the cytoplasmic fragmentation embryos. In the past many studies, ZF embryos after ZPR lose the cell-cell contact and show the flat blastomere structure compared with zona intact (ZI) embryos which show the 3-dimensional (3D) blastomere formation with limited development. Despite the overall need for ZPR for reproductive research, little is known about the effect of ZPR on pre-implantation development, differentiation, and post-implantation development including gene expression. In this study, I investigated the effect of ZPR in the pre- and post-implantation development of mouse embryos.