CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Bone Morphogenetic Protein 4 (BMP4) is a member of the Transforming Growth Factor´s (TGF) family. Noggin is a potent BMP inhibitor that exerts its function binding to BMP members preventing interactions with BMP receptors. The aim of this work is to investigate the role of BMP4 and Noggin, in a first set of experiments on oocytes maturation (IVM experiments) and in a second set of experiment, to study the effect of these factors on the development of preimplanting bovine embryos (IVC experiments). In IVC experiments, not treated matured oocytes were parthenogenically activated or fertilized to generated embryos that were exposed to BMP4 or Noggin at the same concentrations in CR2. After PA or IVF all the evaluations were similar to IVM experiments. Addition of BMP4 or Noggin to IVM medium did not alter the proportion of MII oocytes or the relative concentrations of the studied transcripts. In IVM experiments, PA embryo cleavage rates were higher for both treated groups while IVF embryo cleavage rate was lower for Noggin group. However, blastocyst rates were not affected by these maturation treatments. In culture experiments, presence of Noggin negatively affected development (cleavage and blastocyst rates) of both PA and IVF embryos. Moreover, in IVF embryos, blastocyst rate was lower when exogenous BMP4 was added to culture medium. Oct-4 expression pattern was similar between groups. BMP4 or Noggin addition showed different results depending on whether the embryos were PA or IVF. Our results of suggest that BMP system is implicated in bovine development (from oocyte maturation to blastocyst stage) and moreover that it is a right balance of this system that is needed for proper bovine preimplanting embryo development.