Analysis of microRNAs in bovine early embryonic development. Bos taurus

In animals, the maternal-to-embryonic transition (MET) is an important step occurring in the first days of early development. This important transition involves the degradation of maternal transcripts that have been stocked during oogenesis and used until this transition. Moreover, some precise and specific control mechanisms must govern the adequate synchronization of the MET events to promote embryonic genome activation. These mechanisms are not well understood, but microRNAs could be one of the mechanisms involved. MicroRNAs are short non-coding RNAs involved in a growing number of pathways by their post-transcriptional repression of mRNA translation. Thus, we analyzed microRNA expression during oocyte maturation by comparing GV-oocytes with MII-oocytes in cow. Overall design: Groups of 300 Oocytes_GV and Oocytes_MII were used for miRNA expression analysis. The miRNA expressions were determined using the MiRMammalia_11.0 array from LC Sciences.