Transcriptome high-throughput sequencing derived from mouse blastocysts with artificial oocyte activation treatment

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) has been an effective infertility treatment. Nevertheless, ICSI failures still occurred. One of the factors associated with ICSI failure is oocyte activation deficiency (AOD). The most commonly applied method of artificial oocyte activation (AOA) in humans includes ionophore. Although AOA is performed as a routine process in many assisted reproduction centers, up to date, there is no relevant study to expound whether AOA procedures increase developmental risks by disturbing subsequent gene expression during the embryonic development stages. Our results for the first time provide a profile of the changes in the global patterns of gene expression in AOA treatment versus ICSI generated mouse early embryos. In particular, we focus on the expression changes of imprinted genes. Another key observation in this study is that AOA treatment affects imprinted gene Igf2r expression and mehtylation, which is regulated by the imprinted Airn macro long non-coding (lnc) RNA. Three groups and three independent replicates for each treatment procedure were collected. ICSI, ICSI-AOA and dICSI-AOA were named group A, B and D, respectively in the following sequencing. Group A was the control group.