Effect of taurine and melatonin in the culture medium on buffalo in vitro embryo development

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate the effect of supplementing culture medium with different concentrations of taurine and melatonin, on buffalo oocyte in vitro meiotic maturation and embryo development. In experiment 1, oocytes were matured in vitro and the cleaved embryos were cultured inthe same following seven culture medium; (i) control (TCM199 + 10% SS); (ii) control + 0.5 mM taurine; (iii) con-trol + 1 mM taurine; (iv) control + 3 mM taurine; (v) con-trol + 5 lM melatonin; (vi) control + 10 lM melatonin and(vii) control + 50 lM melatonin. In experiment 2, based onthe results of experiment 1, to examine the synergistic effect of antioxidants, the oocytes were matured in culture medium(TCM199 + 10% SS), supplemented with both taurine at1mM and melatonin at 10 lM concentration and the cleaved embryos were cultured in the same medium. Supplementation of taurine at 1 mM concentration in the culture medium resulted in a higher (p < 0.05) transferable embryo (TE) yield when compared with control (20.6% vs 14.1%). Supplementation of melatonin at 10 and 50 lM concentration in theculture medium resulted in a higher (p < 0.05) meiotic maturation rate (90.3% and 88.8% respectively) and TE yield(28.4% and 27.2% respectively), than the other treatments. In experiment 2, the TE yield did not improve by supplementing the culture medium with both taurine and melatonin, when compared with melatonin alone. In conclusion, the results ofthis study demonstrated that, enriching the culture medium with taurine and melatonin, improves in vitro embryo production efficiency in buffaloes. In particular, a high TE yield was obtained by enriching the culture medium with 10 lM melatonin