Equine preantral follicle harvesting, processing, and in vitro culture: the journey has already started

ABSTRACT

Preantral follicles are of great abundance in mammalian ovaries and the vast majority (>99.9%) never become ovulatory; therefore, the ability to rescue these otherwise wasted follicles seems very aooealing. Considering there are striking similarities in antral follicle dynamics between mares and women, the mare might become a good model to study early (preantral and antral) folliculogenesis in women, with several advantages related to using an animal model. Studies in our laboratory recently validated the use of a transvaginal ultrasound-guided ovarian. Biopsy Pick-Up (BPU) method to harvest preantral follicles using the mare as a model to study early folliculogenesis (Haag et al., 2013a, b, c). This article will review some of the important findings of our recent studies related to the harvesting, processing, and culture of equine preantral follicles and discuss those with the limited information availeble in the literature.