Global gene expression profiles of NT, AI and IVF bovine blastocysts, examination of nuclear reprogramming. Bos taurus

Nuclear transfer (NT) has potential applications in agriculture and biomedicine, but the technology is hindered by low efficiency. Global gene expression analysis of clones is important for the comprehensive study of nuclear reprogramming. Here, we compared global gene expression profiles of individual bovine NT blastocysts with their somatic donor cells and fertilized control embryos utilizing cDNA microarray technology. The NT embryos’ gene expression profiles were drastically different from those of their donor cells and closely resembled those of the naturally fertilized embryos. Our findings demonstrate that the NT embryos have undergone significant nuclear reprogramming by the blastocyst stage; however, problems may occur during re-differentiation for tissue- and organogenesis, and small reprogramming errors may be magnified downstream in development. Keywords: cDNA microarray Overall design: expression profiling of single bovine blastocysts using custon 7,872 cDNA microarray