Boric Acid supplementation promoting the development of in vitro produced mouse embryos

Abstract Boric acid (BA) is an important mineral for plants in nature, animals and human to help metabolic functions. Boric acid has both positive and negative effects on biological systems. In the literature, there is no publication about boric acid effect on preimplantation mouse embryo about in vitro developments. The aim of the present work was to investigate the effects of different concentrations of boric acid added to prior in vitro cytotoxicity for beneficial doses and later the mouse embryo culture media for antioxidant levels, the embryo quality, in vitro development rate and related genes. Superovulated C57Bl6/6j female mice were sacrificed ~18 hours after human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) injection. Single cell stage embryos were collected from the oviducts and the embryos were divided experiment groups and cultured in embryo medium supplemented BA+ in 5% CO2, 37°C until 96-120 h at the blastocyst stage. The blastocyst development rates of 0, DMSO, 10-2, 10-3, 10-4, and 10-5 ppm BA were 51.52% (34/66), 45.00% (9/20), 72.62% (36/49), 77.48% (41/53) and 81.15% (43/53), respectively. The in vitro development rates were significantly higher in the 10-2, 10-3, 10-4 ppm compared with 0 (control) (p<0.05) and 10-5 ppm BA significantly higher compared with control group (p<0.01). With these results, after determining the non-cytotoxic doses of BA, low doses influence embryo development by positively affecting in vitro development rates, embryo cell numbers, biochemical parameters, development at molecular level. Therefore, boric acid seems to play an important role on the in vitro embryo development.