Abstract
SummaryRabbits play an important role in people's lives due to their high nutritional value and high-quality hair that can be used as raw material for textiles. Furthermore, rabbits are an important animal model for human disease, as genome-edited animals are particularly valuable for studying gene functions and pathogenesis. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is an important technique for producing genome-edited animals and it has great value in saving endangered species and in clone stem cell therapy. However, the low efficiency of SCNT limits its application, with the selection of suitable rabbit oocytes being crucial to its success. In the present study, we collected oocytes from ovarian follicles and stained them with 26 μM brilliant cresyl blue (BCB). We then matured the oocytes in vitro and used them for SCNT. Comparison of the BCB-positive oocytes with BCB-negative oocytes and the control group showed that the BCB-positive group had a significantly higher maturation rate (81.4% vs. 48.9% and 65.3% for the negative and control groups, respectively), cleavage rate (86.6% vs. 67.9% and 77.9%), blastocyst rate (30.5% vs. 12.8% and 19.6%), total number of blastocysts (90±7.5 vs. 65.3±6.3 and 67.5±5.7), and inner cell mass (ICM)/ trophectoderm (TE) index (42.3±4.2 vs. 30.2±2.1 and 33.9±5.1) (P<0.05). The BCB-positive group had a significantly lower apoptosis index (2.1±0.6 vs. 8.2±0.9 and 6.7±1.1 for the negative and control groups, respectively) (P<0.05). These findings demonstrate that BCB-positive oocytes have a higher maturation ability and developmental competence in vitro, indicating that BCB staining is a reliable method for selecting oocytes to enhance the efficiency of SCNT.
Highlights
Rabbits play an important role in people’s lives
cumulus–oocyte complexes (COCs) in the control group, which were not stained with brilliant cresyl blue (BCB), had a maturation rate of 65.3% in vitro
COCs in the BCB-negative group had a maturation rate of 48.9%, which was significantly lower than the control group (P < 0.05), while those in the BCB-positive group had a maturation rate of 81.4%, which was significantly higher than the BCB-negative group and control group (P < 0.05) (Table 1)
Summary
Rabbits play an important role in people’s lives. Rabbit meat is of high nutritional value as it is rich in protein, lecithin and lysine, and has low levels of uric acid, calories, fat and cholesterol; it is easy to digest and absorb (Legendre et al, 2017; Mancini et al, 2017). Rabbit hair is an important raw material for textiles (Rafat et al, 2007). Rabbits are an extremely valuable animal model for studying human disease (Esteves et al, 2018). Watanabe heritable hyperlipidaemic (WHHL) and myocardial infarction-prone WHHL (WHHLMI) rabbits that have been developed through the selection of natural mutations were fed cholesterol to establish a human disease model of atherosclerosis, leading to the development of many effective drugs for curing lipid metabolism disorders and atherosclerosis (Shiomi et al, 2013)
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