Acta Veterinaria et Zootechnica Sinica ›› 2022, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (10): 3287-3295.doi: 10.11843/j.issn.0366-6964.2022.10.002

• REVIEW • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Research Progress of DNA Methylation during Porcine Embryonic Development

GAN Jianyu, ZHANG Xin, CAI Gengyuan, HONG Linjun*, HUANG Sixiu*   

  1. National Engineering Research Center for Breeding Swine Industry, College of Animal Science, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China
  • Received:2022-04-20 Online:2022-10-23 Published:2022-10-26

Abstract: Embryonic development in pigs requires a series of crucial physiological stages such as fertilization, cleavage, hatching, morphological transformation, implantation, and cellular differentiation. While a tightly regulated and accurately directed genome is a determining condition for normal embryonic development, recent studies have revealed that appropriate DNA methylation modification also plays an essential role in this process. DNA methylation is a wide and crucial epigenetic modification that does not alter the primary sequence of DNA. However, it contains heritable information and plays an indispensable role in the transcriptional regulation of genes. DNA methylation appears to be a highly dynamic process, influenced by maternal nutrition and developmental conditions in porcine embryonic development. This review describes the effects of DNA methylation on embryonic development from three aspects:early embryonic development, somatic cell nuclear transfer and maternal nutrition during pregnancy, in order to provide references for further research on the mechanism of DNA methylation in porcine embryos during development and to improve the viability of cloned embryos.

Key words: pig, DNA methylation, embryonic development, somatic cell nuclear transfer, pregnancy nutrition, imprinting genes

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