Search

Bisphenol A is a widely used chemical in the manufacture of plastics. The presence of BPA in the environment adversely affects human health due to contamination of air, drinking water and food. Growing concerns about the effects of BPA have led to its regulation in production and development of alternative chemicals to BPA, such as bisphenol S (BPS). However, the effects of BPS were not properly tested before its introduction to production and the effects on human reproduction are still unknown. For this reason, it is desirable to test the effect of BPS on mammalian oocyte development. This study hypothesizes that BPS exposure causes inhibition of meiotic maturation of porcine oocytes in vitro. This study aims to investigate the potency of BPS at low concentrations corresponding to normal human exposures to selected porcine oocyte proteins. The results of this study demonstrate the negative effect of BPS on the progression of meiotic maturation and reaching the mature oocyte stage. In addition, the results show an increase in the formation of defective meiotic spindles and a disruption of mitochondrial integrity after exposure to BPS concentrations. However, the effect of BPS on double-strand breaks was not demonstrated in this study, in contrast to the case of BPA. Taken together, the results show...

The mission of assisted reproductive medicine is to achieve the highest success rate of implantation and the subsequent birth of a healthy child. The current standard is the transfer of only one embryo and thus there is a great effort to develop an unbiased and accurate embryo assessment methods. This bachelor thesis is an overview of several selected techniques and their advantages and disadvantages. The selection of methods included in this thesis is based on their potential contribution to embryo assessment and the number and availability of relevant studies. I tried to compare the classical morphological approach with the newly developed methods monitoring vitality biomarkers, including genetic, metabolic and proteomic analysis. Because of the lack of information concerning techniques from clinical practice and large randomized trials, the comparison of new and old methods is questionable. Nevertheless, their principal differences can be compared. Conventional morphological assessment is based on the large extent of the subjective assessment by the assessor. On the other hand biomarker monitoring methods are based on empirical data. The outlook for the future is the complementarity of biomarker monitoring to morphological assessment. Key words: early embryo, human, developmental competence,...