Plant & Animal Genomes XV Conference

January 13-17, 2007
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Physiological Genomics Of Preimplantation Bovine Embryogenesis

Muge Misirlioglu1 , Grier P Page2 , Hakan Sagirkaya1 , Abdullah Kaya3 , John J Parrish3 , Neal L First4 , Erdogan Memili1

  1Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA 2Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Alabama-Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, 35294, USA 3Department of Animal Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA 4Department of Biological Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA

Embryonic genome activation (EGA) is the most important event of early mammalian development.
Upon egg activation and fertilization, maternal factors initiate developmental cascades of events that activate the embryonic developmental program. Messages that preexist during embryogenesis are degraded following fertilization and new transcripts and proteins are produced at a species-specific cell stage. It is this dramatic programming of gene expression that sets the stage for the first differentiative events, successful embryo implantation, and fetal development. In order to better understand genome programming at the onset of development, we have recently elucidated molecular and developmental correlates of preimplantation bovine embryos in vitro. Furthermore, we determined functional blue-prints of bovine matured oocytes and preimplantation embryos using bovine genome specific high resolution DNA microarrays (Affymetrix, Inc.). Our results can provide molecular biomarkers for development since embryonic mortality is the biggest limiting factor in animal reproduction and production. Furthermore, they may assist in increasing the efficiency of reprogramming in somatic cell nuclear transfer derived embryogenesis, and can serve as a basis for more hypotheses-driven research to elucidate the molecular biology of mammalian gametogenesis and embryogenesis.