HUMAN EMBRYOS

The OPS has been successfully applied for human embryos of all developmental stages. OPS means a highly promising approach for cryopreservation of biopsied blastocysts, allowing time for detailed analysis of the sample and for recovery of the uterine endothelium that was potentially damaged during the oocyte collection cycle.

Achievements

HUMAN MII PHASE OOCYTES

The first baby born after vitrification of human oocytes has been produced with OPS (Kuleshova et al., 2000). With improved equilibration and dilution parameters and optimized cooling and warming procedures OPS has become a method of choice in this extremely important and rapidly expanding field.

HMAN ESCs

So far, the OPS is regarded as the most efficient carrier tool for cryopreservation of human embryonic stem cells (Reubinoff et al. 2001). According to the special requirements a modified OPS has been developed and is successfully used now in many laboratories working with ES or iPS cells.

Please note:

if a morphologically intact oocyte or blastocyst does not survive vitrification, it is usually your fault

DOMESTIC SPECIES

Survival and developmental rates achieved with bovine, ovine, caprine, equine oocytes, early and late preimplantation embryos (including hatched blastocysts) were found extremely high, incomparable with those with traditional freezing. OPS was found especially efficient for embryos with high lipid content (dark cytoplasm) including in vivo derived embryos of some cattle breed and pigs, although results with in vitro cultured pig embryos are still controversial.

IN VITRO PRODUCED EMBRYOS

Recent embryo culture systems are capable to produce in vitro produced bovine embryos with almost the same quality as their in vivo derived counterpart. In that case, OPS vitrification does not compromise developmental and pregnancy-calving rates compared to those achieved with unvitrified controls.

First in the world - vitrification

Oocyte + blastocyst OPS

Polecat in vivo embryo OPS

First in the world - vitrification

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DIRECT TRANSFER AFTER VITRIFICATION

The unique feature of OPS is that it can be connected to in-straw dilution and direct transfer in cattle.
The procedure is extremely simple and highly efficient, decreases costs, increases pregnancy rates and may mean an enormous help to resolve logistic problems

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