Factors affecting early embryonic development in cattle: relevance for bovine cloning

Abstract

Female infertility represents a major challenge for improving the production efficiency in the dairy industry. Historically, fertility has declined whereas milk yield has increased tremendously due to intensive genetic selection. In vivo evidence reveals about 60% pregnancy loss takes place during the first month following fertilization. Meanwhile, early embryo development is significant for somatic cell nuclear transfer in cattle as a large proportion of cloned embryos fail to develop beyond peri-implantation stage. Oocyte quality is of utmost importance for the early embryo to develop to term for both fertilized and cloned embryos. Epigenetic reprogramming is a key process occurring after fertilization and critical roles of epigenetic modifiers during preimplantation development are now clear. Incomplete epigenetic reprogramming is believed to be a major limitation to cloning efficiency. Treatment of cloned embryos with epigenetic modifying drugs (e.g., Trichostatin A) could greatly improve cloning efficiency in both mice and cattle. Recently, the rapid progress in high-throughput sequencing technologies has enabled detailed deciphering of the molecular mechanisms underlying these events. The robust efficiency of genomic editing tools also presents an alternative approach to the functional annotation of genes critical to early development.

Keywords

bovine cloning / embryo development / somatic cell nuclear transfer / X-inactive specific transcript

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31672416), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the One Hundred Talents Program of Zhejiang University.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Yanna Dang and Kun Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article is a review and does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)