Figure 5. Effect of human GDF9 forms (wild-type and M1–M4) during porcine oocyte maturation on subsequent oocyte developmental competence.

Porcine COCs with inherently low developmental competence were treated with vehicle, 200 ng/mL human wild-type GDF9 (WT), or one of the human mutant GDF9 forms (M1–M4) for the first 22 hours of IVM. The effects of treatments on oocyte development competence were examined by measuring the following points of embryo development: cleavage rate at day 2 (A), blastocyst rate expressed as a percentage of the number of cleaved embryos at day 7 (B), total blastocyst cell number on day 7 (C), and hatching blastocyst rate (number of hatching or hatched blastocysts/cleaved embryos) (D). All values are presented as means ± SEM from 5 replicate experiments. Different letters indicate significant differences at P < .05 within the same graph. Cont, control.