Heterogenous Macromolecular Contributions to Early Mouse Embryo Development: (in vitro culture/mouse embryos/abnormal...

Mouse embryos have been cultured for more than one half of its gestation period by providing sera from definite species of animals as the inducer at the proper stage of development. The processes of normal development at four different but discrete phases have been described. (1) Fertilized ovum (stage 1) is able to grow up to denuded blastocyst stage and attaches to the culture dish (stage 7) in balanced salt solution with bovine serum albumin as the sole macromolecule. (2) Embryoblast or inner cell mass (ICM) of denuded blastocyst (stage 7) is able to develop in fetal calf serum (FCS), human placenta cord serum (FCS), or sera from mouse (MS), rat (RS) or rabbit (RbS) to the early cylinder stage (stage 11). (3) The early egg cylinder stage (stage 11) of mouse embryo is able to grow in HCS and RS, but not in FCS nor RbS, to the stage of early somite stage (stage 15). (4) Beyond early somite stage (stage 15), mouse embryo is able to develop neural tissues in rat serum. The macromolecular nature of these growth factors in serum has been described (Hsu, 1980). It indicates that the differential biological activity which induces the early mouse embryogenesis among the sera from different animal species is due to the various degree of sequence homology between the growth factor family among the different species of animals.