Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have discovered a method for in vitro fertilization in horses, resulting in the birth of three healthy foals.
Assisted reproduction in horses is often the method of choice for a variety of reasons, including preventing harm to the mare during breeding. Prior to this breakthrough, traditional in vitro fertilization (IVF), where a sperm fertilizes an egg in a petri dish, had been attempted for horses but was not successful, despite repeated attempts at manipulation.
Dr. Katrin Hinrichs, professor of reproduction at PennVet, and her colleagues have created a conventional IVF technique that has resulted in a 90 percent fertilization rate, with 74 percent of fertilized eggs resulting in blastocytes – a mass of cells that develop into the embryo and placenta.
The techniques don't require extensive training or equipment, Hinrichs says, so more veterinary practices may be able to offer the service.
In the past, other assisted reproduction techniques have been employed with little success. These include injecting a single sperm into an egg and extracting an oocyte from a mare, surgically placing it in a recipient mare and then inseminating the recipient mare. Utilizing the recipient mare was invasive and expensive; the technique wasn't feasible for many mare owners or veterinarians.
Key research for the breakthrough was done by Dr. Matheus Felix, now the chief embryologist in the Penn Equine Assisted Reproduction Laboratory. Sperm must undergo physiological changes to fertilize an egg. Felix tried a specific medium for incubating the sperm as well as a longer-than-normal incubation period to see if that might help the sperm fertilize the egg – and it worked.
The research team perfected the technique, finding that pre-incubating the sperm for 22 hours in the specific medium, then adding oocytes to the medium for three hours, led to a 74 percent production of blastocytes. Thus far, three foals have been born from this process.
There is still room for improvement, Hinrichs notes, saying that this method worked well only for fresh sperm; frozen sperm did not have the same results. Additionally, the medium must be precise, so variations may compromise the fertilization success.
Read more at the Pennsylvania News.
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