WORDS BY PIPER WHELAN
MULTIPLYING
SUCCESS A powerful genetic tool once used primarily in the dairy industry picks up steam, offering new possibilities for beef cattle reproduction.
T
he latest innovation in bovine reproductive technology is exciting, ground-breaking and increasingly becoming a more feasible option for beef producers wanting to use embryo transplant with added benefits in their herd. It’s also not entirely new. In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) was first introduced in cattle more than 15 years ago, and was poised to transform the beef industry. However, IVF embryo transfer originally had a number of problems associated with the resulting pregnancies, such as large calves and placental abnormalities. “In the intervening years, they refined the process and figured out what was causing a lot of the large calves and other issues,” says Dr. Rob Stables, veterinary at Bow Valley Genetics Ltd. in Bassano, Alberta. These issues, he explains, were most likely caused by the type of media used in the lab process. Stables first became interested in IVF when it was introduced in his early days as a vet. Despite the initial issues, he saw that “it had the potential to change the industry,” he says. “The excitement of a new technique and the advancement of the science was the initial draw to it, and now that they’ve figured out a lot of it, it made it a lot more practical. That’s when we decided to get into it, and it’s becoming more user-friendly and more practical in the real world.” Today, IVF is a more viable option for North American
beef producers, with companies specializing in dairy cattle IVF expanding their labs to bring in beef clients.
How IVF Works The major differences between IVF and conventional embryo transfer are how the eggs (oocytes) are fertilized and when they are removed from the donor cow. “We’re going in before the cow has a heat and aspirating (removing) those eggs off of the ovary before they have a chance to ovulate,” says Stables. “Conventionally, the eggs are going to ovulate, get fertilized and be collected seven days later.” The collected oocytes are put into a maturation media, simulating ovulation overnight. In the morning, they’re ready to be fertilized. “At the lab they’ll process the semen, mix it with the oocytes for fertilization and then the next five to six days are spent growing the embryos to the stage of embryo that we’d normally be collecting out of a conventional flush, which is a seven-day embryo,” Stables explains. Bow Valley Genetics is a satellite collection facility for Boviteq, a bovine reproductive company with state-of-the-art labs in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, and Madison, Wisconsin, that focuses primarily on dairy cattle genetics. Central labs like Boviteq generally set the price for IVF embryo services, which will involve fixed costs for the collection, processing and lab
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