BioProject

Measuring transcriptomic profiles of human embryos cultured in time-lapse imaging (TLI) incubator and standard incubator (SI) is crucial for studying whether the closed culture system has a positive impact on embryos. Here we used RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) to characterize and compare the gene expression profiles of TLI and SI cultured 8-cell embryos with the same quality grade. A total of 580,952,620 fragments were sequenced for zygote, SI and TLI groups. The global transcriptomic profiles of embryos from TLI group were similar to SI group, with a high distinct to zygotes. However, wo also detected 539 genes showing differential expression between the TLI and SI group with false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.05. Using GO enrichment analysis, we found that the high expressed genes in SI tend to execute functions, including transcription, RNA splicing and DNA repair, and the high expressed genes in TLI were enriched in the cell differentiation and methyltransferase activity pathway. This study provides the first comparison between SI and TLI via transcriptome analysis, and will serve as a basis for assessing the safety of TLI application in assisted reproductive technology. Overall design: In total, we analyzed the transcriptomes of 3 groups of embryos in human: zygote, standard and time-lapse monitoring incubators produced 8-cell embryos using RNA-Seq technology. Pools of 5 embryos in one sample, 3 replicates in each group.