The Effect of Various Concentrations of Taurine During in Vitro Fertilization on the Development of Bovine Embryos Fertilized with Spermatozoa from Three Different Bulls (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Bovine oocytes can be developed to the blastocyst stage, which is a possible implantation stage. However, the success of IVF is markedly dependent on individual bulls, as well as on ejaculates from the same bull (Kreysing et al., 1997; Zhang et al., 1997; Zhang et al., 2003; Alomar et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2009). To decrease the variation in the embryonic development from different bulls, some reagents such as caffeine, heparin, caffeine plus heparin, caseine phosphopeptides and pentoxyfylline have been used during IVF (Niwa and Ohgoda, 1988; Fukui et al., 1990; Saeki et al., 1995; Kreysing et al., 1997; Numabe et al., 2001; Pavlok et al., 2001; Tartaglione and Ritta, 2004). However, bull variation when using the IVF technique is still one of the problems affecting the in vitro production of bovine embryos (Almoar et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2009).