H Nazari - Research Institute of Animal Embryo Technology, Shahrekord university, Shahrekord, Iran
A Shirazi - Research Institute of Animal Embryo Technology, Shahrekord university, Shahrekord, Iran. Department of Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran. Reproductive Biotechnology Research Center, Avicenna Re-sear
A Afzali - Medical faculty, Tehran University of medical Sciences, Tehran,Iran

Background: Developmental competency of reconstructed embryos with different types of donor nucleus is often lower than in vivo and in vitro counterparts. Presence of a reliable indicator in level of transcription of donor cell or preimplantation embryo can help to prediction the postimplantation develop-mental fate of cloned embryo.Materials and Methods: In this study, the developmental abil-ity and the pattern of some pluripotency related genes (Oct4, Sox2, Nanog) in bovine cloned embryos reconstructed mes-enchymal stem cells (MSCs), and adult fibroblasts (AF) were compared with in vitro fertilized (IVF) counterparts. For these purposes, in vitro matured abattoir-derived oocytes were con-sidered as recipients and hand-made cloning technique was used for oocyte enucleation and cell attachment in NT proce-dure.Results: Despite the lower developmental rate in NT derived embryos (12.05 and 19.23% For AF- and MSCs-NT derived blastocysts, respectively) than IVF counterparts (26.7% Blas-tocyst rate) (P<0.05), but the use of stem cells improved de-velopmental competency of reconstructed embryos, signifi-cantly (P<0.05). As well as, the relative abundance (RA) of the Oct4 transcripts at the blastocyst stage exhibited higher level of expression in in vitro produced embryos. Though IVF em-bryos did differ significantly higher than AF embryos (P<0.05), whereas no difference was observed between IVF and MSC-NT embryos.Conclusion: By evaluation of the relationship between the ex-pression of genes involved in pluripotency and developmental competency in produced blastocysts, it can be concluded that Oct4 can be regarded as an indicator of the embryos produced quality.

Nuclear Transfer, Oct4, Developmental Competency, Bovine, Embryo