Interestingly, in spite of the stringent culture conditions, development was not worse in both lines of BAD-tg Perifosine Akt inhibitor embryos compared to IVP embryos cultured in parallel. More specifically, development to at least compact morula stages was nearly twice as high in the transgenic embryos, whereas development from compact morula to transferable grade embryos was slightly, but not significantly, lower in BAD overexpressing embryos. However, the relatively high early developmental rates of the transgenic embryos is a non-specific nuclear transfer effect and the presently observed rates were not significantly different to previous nuclear transfer experiments we have conducted with serum starved transgenic and non-transgenic EF5 cells. Both wild type and transgenic embryos transcribed endogenous BAD at low levels. However BAD-tg embryos expressed ectopic BAD abundantly, at similar levels as the geomean of the housekeepers used. We next PB 203580 assessed whether transferable grade BAD-tg blastocysts were of equal developmental potential to their non-transgenic in vitro produced counterparts. Transgenic and wild type embryos were transferred into recipient animals and retrieved on Days 13 and 14. At these stages ectopic BAD expression had decreased to moderate levels, but were still well in excess of endogenous BAD levels. From the proportion of embryos recovered, it was clear that continuous BAD overexpression had not lead to increased embryo mortality during the second week of development. The length of transgenic and non-transgenic embryos did not differ significantly. As previously observed, length is highly variable and recipient dependent. However, we saw a striking difference in morphology. A quarter of IVP derived embryos had no epiblast, in strict accordance to past observations of IVP as well as nuclear transfer generated embryos. In contrast, 72% of line 1 and all line 2 transgenic embryos were without an embryonic disc/epiblast, a highly significant result. It is unlikely that this is a general nuclear transfer-specific effect based on our previous work using EF5 cells.