Fig. 1From: Functional role of AKT signaling in bovine early embryonic development: potential link to embryotrophic actions of follistatinExperimental design. To establish the role of AKT in early bovine embryonic development, bovine zygotes were cultured in the presence or absence of different doses of AKT inhibitors III or IV for 3 days. The optimized dose of each inhibitor was supplemented with or without 10 ng/ml follistatin to determine the effects on AKT phosphorylation at 10 h after treatment and development of AKT inhibitor treated embryos. On day 3 of development, embryos were washed and cultured in fresh media without any treatment for an additional 4 days. Indices of embryo development including early cleavage rate (30 hpi), total cleavage rate (48 hpi), percentage of embryos developing to the 8- to 16-cell stage (72 hpi), and percentage of embryos developing to the blastocyst stage (day 7) were recordedBack to article page