Abstract
The present study was conducted to clarify changes of intermediate filaments, cytokeratin, vimentin and desmin, in primary, subcultured and cryopreserved bovine oviduct epithelial cells by subculture or cryopreservation and to assess their sustaining ability for the embryo development. Any morphological change of cells isolated from bovine oviducts and cultured in vitro was not observed up to the fifth generation, including cryopreserved cells. Result of indirect immunofluorescent staining study strongly suggested that the primary cells were epithelial cells because immunofluorescence to anti-cytokeratin antibody was detected but not observed anti-vimentin and anti-desmin antibody. From second generation, however, the reaction of vimentin was become to be detected, suggesting that the nature of the epithelial cells changed. Sustaining ability of epithelial cells was assessed by co-culture of bovine parthenogenetic embryos with the oviduct epithelial cells. The results showed that sustaining ability of primary and subcultured-cryopreserved bovine oviductal cells was equivalent in which 29.8% and 28.3% of the parthenogenones in each cases developed to blastocysts. These results suggested that the expression of vimentin in culturing bovine oviduct epithelial cells and their sustaining ability for bovine parthenogenetic embryos had no relation.
