Transcript – Paternal Contribution to Placentation and Pregnancy Success

Howdy, my name is Ky Pohler from the Department of Animal Science, and my group is specifically interested in understanding the factors that drive both pregnancy loss and effect presentation in domestic livestock species. Specifically, we’re interested in understanding either the maternal or paternal contributions to plantation and pregnancy success in our family tree project. Myself and collaborators from Texas A&M Veterinary School developed the model using pathogen attack embryos, which are embryos that only have female based genome. And there’s no paternal based genome at all on these embryos where we transfer these embryos into recipient animals or cows to successfully establish pregnancy and carry that pregnancy to at least eight thirty one of gestation. And one of the things that we were interested in looking at is what is the difference between these embryos and embryos that have both paternal and maternal genomes or a normal by parental embryo? And what we have observed to date is that these embryos in their presentation are drastically different. And one of the big observations that we’ve made is that these parthenogenetic embryos are the ones that are lacking paternal based, the maternal based genome, don’t have Classico plantation based aspects and don’t produce the same products that the control embryos do. Specifically, one of the proteins that we’re interested in is pregnancy associated glycoprotein. So this has been a really nice model and is now leading to more grand ideas in regards to using this model to really sort out the molecular differences and the molecular contributions between the paternal and maternal genome in regards to pregnancy, success and presentation in our domestic ruminants.