ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, culture systems have been developed with the aim of growing oocytes from the earliest follicular stages to maturity for in vitro fertilization (IVF). This technology could, in principle, revolutionize clinically assisted reproduction and farm animal production. However, complete growth in culture from the primordial stage with subsequent IVF of oocytes followed by embryo transfer and production of live offspring has, so far, only been achieved in the mouse.1,2 There are other rodent culture systems that have produced developmentally competent oocytes and viable offspring, but they start with growing follicles and require a shorter period in vitro.3-6 The success of these techniques has encouraged the even more demanding challenge of adapting them for larger animals. In both domestic species and primates (including humans), these techniques have been used to study the regulation of follicle development, but the ultimate aim of follicle culture is to produce more competent oocytes from primordial follicle stages than would normally be available from conventional methods, such as ovarian stimulation with gonadotropins. We are still a long way from being able to use follicle culture as a strategy for obtaining competent oocytes from these species. Nevertheless, much progress has been made in recent years in developing culture techniques for a number of species and at several stages of follicle growth. In this Chapter, we describe the technologies and discuss the prospects as well as the problems of applying them clinically.
