Post implantation development reveals that biopsy procedure can segregate “healthy” from “unhealthy” bovine embryos and prevent miscarriages

•Blastocyst stage of IVF biopsied embryos affects implantation.•Embryo biopsy did not affect calving rates, weight of calves, or gestation length.•Early pregnancy loss is reduced in biopsied IVF embryos.

Embryo biopsy has been performed in bovine in vivo produced embryos for the last twenty years, but little could be done with few embryonic cells in the past. Recently, advances in single cell analysis enabled a wide range of applications using embryo biopsy, from morphology to genetics analysis and different omics-techniques, which are promising for in vitro-fertilized (IVF) embryos. The aim of this study was to address if biopsy procedure would affect post implantation development of IVF blastocyts. Here we show that blastocyst stage do not affect re-expansion of biopsied embryos (regular blastocyst: 73.7%; expanded blastocyst: 73.1%), but affects (p < 0.05) implantation (regular blastocyst: 37.8%, expanded blastocyst: 61.0%), so ideally biopsy should be performed in expanded blastocysts. No detrimental effect of biopsy procedure was detected for post-implantation development (calving rates, Biopsy: 47.1%, Control: 41.9%), and normal calves were born (Birth weight, Biopsy: 32.10 ± 7.20 kg; Control: 30.95 ± 5.43 kg). Surprisingly, we found interesting results suggesting embryo survival can be increased with aggressive procedures (such as embryo biopsy), and this is highly associated with early pregnancy loss (Biopsy: 0%, Control: 17.4%). This finding also suggests morphological classification of day 7 blastocysts is far from ideal, and supposedly, unhealthy embryos can implant but are bound to miscarriage during the first trimester (non-biopsied embryos). Our results show biopsy procedure is safe for bovine IVF embryos, and shed new light into the importance of conceptus in early pregnancy loss in cattle.

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