The development of zygotes in early stages has significant impact on miscarriage of embryos at later stages of pregnancy. There are a lot of changes at genome and transcriptome level during early stages where the chromatin is re-modeled which in return it can influence the expression profile and fate of embryos. IVF is used to fertilise eggs and to assist with conception of a child. Clinical success of this technique depends on many factors and in order to have better understanding, we aim to study expression profile of generated zygotes by IVF under different environments. We have successfully generated the first batch of IVF, extracted RNA from zygote pools, and conducted sequencing at SciLife lab sequencing facility.
Our main objective is to evaluate the expression of the samples in different environments and compare them with control group. The outcome of this analysis will help us to have better understanding on impact of environmental factors on genes and pathways which can be target of drugs that can potentially assist clinician in improving IVF success. In this round we will study zygotes at 2 and 4-cell stages and the candidate genes will be profiled in different stages by other means (e.g. qPCR or additional sequencing).