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Evolution Of Embryo Production

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Introduction
IVF is one of these important innovations that will assure the trade of genetics of various species across the globe. Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of both in vivo and in vitro bovine embryo production between 1997 and 2015 based on data recovered by IETS’ Data Retrieval Committee (Perry, 2016). In this figure, it is apparent that in vivo embryo production was an important technology used by many producers until this production leveled off in 2006 and seemed to decrease slightly with the following years up to 2015. On the other hand, although hardly used in the late 1990s, IVF embryo production has increased significantly year after year with an all-time high of over 600,000 IVF embryos produced in 2015, which represents …show more content…

Furthermore, other studies reported higher incidences of calves resulting from these IVF embryos that exhibited abnormal offspring syndrome (AOS; Farin et al., 2006). As research progressed in this field, laboratories introduced sequential defined or semi-defined media that were based on studies that characterized the oviduct and uterine environments during the first 7 days of life of an in vivo embryo. With these new media, IVF embryos were of higher quality, survived significantly more slow-freezing protocols and reduced significantly the incidences of AOS. This increase in cryotolerance made it possible to apply Direct Transfer (DT) techniques just like in vivo produced embryos. Considering this advantage, this opens up opportunities to export IVF embryos as easily as in vivo embryos. Although the import/export of frozen IVF embryos is still limited, different players, whether from the private sector, the universities, or the government, are working with appropriate regulatory agencies to open these markets to meet the global demand for bovine genetics. However, the one caveat of IVF is that there are still different IVF systems (media suite and techniques) used by commercial businesses worldwide. This will result in variations in embryo quality from one IVF unit to another and therefore impact number of high quality IVF embryos produced, the cryosensitivty of these embryos as well as resulting gestation rates.
Another reason why IVF is being used more in the ET

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