Temporal patterns of embryonic gene expression and their dependence on oogenetic factors.

摘要

This review considers the activation of embryonic transcription in mammals, and discusses maternal and zygotic messenger RNA expression in cattle oocytes and embryos respectively. The putative role of maternally inherited factors in conferring developmental competence to blastocyst-stage embryos in cattle is discussed, and a method of screening for putative oocyte-specific transcripts that might confer developmental competence on the blastocyst-stage embryo is described.