Reproduction Abstracts

For ruminant livestock producers, appropriate maternal nutrition during pregnancy is central to the production of viable offspring of optimal birth weight, and impacts postnatal growth, body composition, and reproductive potential. Young still-growing adolescent mothers are particularly vulnerable to nutritional extremes and assisted conception procedures have helped define the relative importance of diverse nutritional exposures. Pre-conception nutrition (via manipulation of ...

Many studies demonstrating that the environment a pregnant female experiences can have profound and sometimes persistent effects on offspring development use extreme experimental perturbations which do not reflect the range of environments a pregnant female is actually likely to experience. We have assessed offspring reproductive development following treatments designed to reflect husbandry and management conditions that pregnant sheep or pigs encounter. Female offspring of s...

Successful pregnancy depends on a succession of complex biological processes that are regulated temporally and spatially. In term of contribution to pregnancy, the mother not only produces oocytes but she also hosts the whole gestation, mainly in the uterus. For decades, a major focus has been made on oocyte and embryo quality in term of contribution to progression and issue of pregnancy in mammals, including cattle. Nevertheless, in the bovine species, recent studies have cle...