Effect Of Ascorbic Acid On Meiotic Competence And Gene Expression Of Growing Porcine Oocyte Derived From Early Antral Follicle

Abstract

Assisted reproduction is starting to focus on the numerous preantral follicles as they have great potentials because of their great availability in the ovary and they present in the gonad at all ages (Leonel et al., 2018). However, the present in vitro grow culture system for smaller follicles production is still less effective oocytes (Fadini et al., 2014) Therefore, we developed an in vitro culture system with additional L-Ascorbic acid to support the porcine oocytes derived from early antral follicles development to the mature stage. The results indicates that oocytes cultured in IVG medium with additional Ascorbic acid achieved better growth in size, higher rate reaching germinal vesicle stage after IVG culturing and higher maturation rate. Especially, with the concentration of Ascorbic acid 50 µg/mL, the size of the ooplasm increased the most (123.33  1.52 m), close to that of the positive control group (119.13  0.22 m) and highest rate of oocytes reaching MII stage after IVM culturing (37.88%). The differences in the gene expression rate between oocytes derived from EAFs and LAFs were investigated and the results showed an increase in GDF9, BMP15 and ZP3 genes and a decrease in CAT, P53 and BAX genes along the growth of the oocytes