The OPU live egg harvesting technology has many advantages. OPU live egg harvesting technology can enable each cow to produce a large number of offspring within a limited time. Because OPU technology does not rely on the reproductive status of donor cattle, oocytes can be collected from young animals and pregnant animals at 3 months of age through surgical or non-surgical methods. In addition, oocytes collected once can be fertilized in vitro using semen from different bulls. In the MOET breeding system, only one breed of bull can be used for fertilization, so the OPU live egg collection technique can achieve maximum genetic progress and minimum inbreeding coefficient.

OPU live egg collection instrument for testing cow egg collection

When the OPU live egg retrieval device successfully inserted the egg retrieval needle through the vaginal vault until the follicle, no discomfort or pain was found in the cow, and no vaginal or follicular bleeding was detected. When the needle was not inserted smoothly and caused damage to the follicle, ovarian bleeding occurred. However, after 4 days of re observation of the damaged cow, no damage was observed. Moreover, the ovaries and follicles developed well, and the vaginal environment was normal. It was preliminarily confirmed that the ultrasound guided egg retrieval method would not have adverse effects on the reproductive function and health of cows. The results of egg collection every 4 days are consistent with those reported abroad. Moreover, foreign experiments have shown that collecting oocytes twice a week for four consecutive months has no impact on the health and sexual cycle of cattle.

The application of bovine embryo transfer technology has greatly improved the reproductive efficiency of cows. However, due to the instability of cows' response to exogenous hormone superovulation, especially the adverse effects of continuous superovulation treatment on donor cows, obtaining multiple embryos from excellent cows is limited. With the maturity of in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology in cattle, embryos can be produced in vitro. However, the OPU live oocyte collection device mainly obtains oocytes from slaughtered cow ovaries, which is obviously not feasible for valuable cattle. The live egg harvesting technology developed in recent years has effectively solved this problem. This technology is an embryo engineering technique developed and introduced after in vitro fertilization technology and embryo transfer technology.

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