In Vitro Culture of Late Stage Pig Embryos in a Chemically Defined Medium, Porcine Blastocyst Medium (PBM).

In vitro production (IVP) of porcine preimplantation embryos is an important technique not only for basic and biomedical research purposes but also for animal biotechnology application such as transgenesis, cloning, and embryo transfer. In this chapter, we demonstrate a superior IVP procedure of porcine embryos derived from cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) of slaughtered pig ovaries which are cultured sequentially in different defined media. Porcine blastocyst medium (PBM) particularly designed for the late stage embryo culture could improve the potential of morulae or blastocysts to develop into hatching and hatched blastocysts with good quality.