Abstract
Assisted reproductive technologies play a major role in the cattle industry. An increase in the use of in vitro-derived embryos is currently being seen around the globe. But the efficiency and quality of the in vitro-derived embryos are substandard when compared to the in vivo production. Different protocols have been designed to overcome this issue, one of those being the use of reproductive fluids as supplementation to embryo culture media. In this study, in vitro-derived calves produced with reproductive fluids added to their embryo production protocol were followed for the first year of life pairwise with their in vivo control, produced by artificial insemination (AI), and their in vitro control, produced with standard supplementation in embryo production. The objective was to assess if any differences could be found in terms of growth and development as well as hematological and biochemical analytes between the different systems. All the analysed variables (physical, hematological, and biochemical) were within physiological range and very similar between calves throughout the entire experiment. However, differences were more evident between calves derived from standard in vitro production and AI. We concluded that the use of reproductive fluids as a supplementation to the embryo culture media results in calves with closer growth and development patterns to those born by AI than the use of bovine serum albumin as supplementation.
Highlights
The current data on bovine embryo transfer (ET) illustrate how substantial the use of in vitro-produced (IVP) embryos has emerged in detriment of in vivo-derived (IVD) embryos, with a difference of almost double the number of IVP embryos being transferred [1]
Body temperature (Figure 2E) was affected by the day of collection and influenced by the group: temperature was higher for artificial insemination (AI) calves vs. bovine serum albumin (BSA) calves on days 120 and 240 (39.39 ± 0.09 and 39.37 ± 0.13 vs. 38.98 ± 0.14 and 38.64 ± 0.15, respectively) and higher too for reproductive fluids (RF) calves (39.68 ± 0.21) vs. BSA calves on day 195 (38.92 ± 0.15)
Average daily weight gain (ADWG) was altered by the day of data collection, but not by group, being the only difference found on day 105, where AI calves showed a higher weight gain than those in both BSA and RF calves (Figure 3A)
Summary
The current data on bovine embryo transfer (ET) illustrate how substantial the use of in vitro-produced (IVP) embryos has emerged in detriment of in vivo-derived (IVD) embryos, with a difference of almost double the number of IVP embryos being transferred [1]. Recent alternatives to embryo culture medium composition or supplementation [4,5,6,7] have been proposed in order to improve the quality and quantity of blastocysts. These alternatives are capable of producing in vitro embryos in higher numbers [4, 6] with improved gene expression patterns [5, 7, 8] or with increased survival to cryopreservation [4, 5, 7] when compared to the. Other differences in the phenotype of IVP-derived animals such as increased birth weight [12,13,14,15,16], increased growth performance at juvenile age [13, 17], or decreased milk yield [13] have been reported
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