Noncytopathogenic bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) reduces cleavage but increases blastocyst yield of in vitro produced embryos.

The growing application of in vitro embryo production systems that utilize slaughterhouse tissues of animals of unknown health status conveys the risk of disease transmission. One pathogen of concern in this regard is bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), and the objective of this study was to investigate the effect of BVDV on in vitro embryonic development. A bovine in vitro embryo production system was experimentally infected with BVDV at 2 stages: prior to in vitro maturation by incubating cumulus-oocyte complexes (COC) with virus (strain Pe515; titer 10(6.2) tissue culture infective dose (TCID)50/mL) or vehicle for 2 h, and then during in vitro culture by the use of BVDV infected granulosa cells. Exposure to BVDV throughout in vitro production reduced cleavage rates (P = 0.01) but increased (P = 0.05) the number of embryos that reached the 8-cell stage when expressed as a percentage of cleaved oocytes. Blastocyst yield was increased by the presence of virus when expressed as a proportion of oocytes (P = 0.0034) or of those cleaved (P < 0.0001). The percentage of total blastocyst yield on Days 7, 8 and 9 for the control and virus treatments was 20, 51, 29 and 29, 41, and 29%, respectively, indicating that the rate of blastocyst development was nonsignificantly faster in the virus-treated group (P = 0.06). These results indicate that the presence of non-cytopathogenic BVDV in an in vitro production system may reduce cleavage rates but allow those cleaved to develop to blastocysts at a higher rate.