Abstract
Developmental plasticity—the ability of an embryo to retain viability in the face of environmental fluctuation and challenge—is the biological quality that has facilitated the success of clinical in vitro fertilization. Plasticity, however, can be foe as weil as friend because it is a major confounder in experimental efforts to define the nutritional requirements of preimplantation embryos. For example, the range in latitude we are afforded by plasticity in one embryo may not be the same that is available in a sibling embryo. Patient age, diagnosis, and ovarian stimulation protocol all impinge upon plasticity, so producing a cohort of embryos with developmental tolerances similar to another cohort is difficult at best. Optimization requires us to find the middle of the range of tolerances. This approaches impossibility without quantitative measures in vitro that relate directly to viability after transfer.
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Pool, T.B. (2001). Blastocyst Development in Culture: The Role of Macromolecules. In: Gardner, D.K., Lane, M. (eds) ART and the Human Blastocyst. Proceedings in the Serono Symposia USA Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0149-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0149-3_9
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