Abstract
Morphological and biochemical changes in the cells surrounding the oocyte seem to be extremely important in an effective fertilization process. Thanks to advanced cell culture techniques, as well as biochemical and bioinformatics analyses, we can partly imitate the phenomena occurring in the living organism. Previous studies showed a possibility of short – and long – term OEC in vitro cultivation, during which these cells have shown to have significant proliferation and expression of genes responsible for differentiation. Our research was aimed at maintaining a culture of porcine oviduct epithelial cells and analyzing their gene expression profile. The study employed cross-bred gilts at the age of about 9 months, obtained from commercial herds. With the use of Affymetrix® Porcine Gene 1.1 ST Array Strip, we have examined the expression of 12257 transcripts. Genes with fold change higher than abs (2) and with corrected p-value lower than 0.05 were considered as differentially expressed. We chose 20 genes with the most marked expression (10 up – regulated, 10 down – regulated) for further investigation in the context of literature sources. These genes belonged to three ontological groups: “cell cycle process”, “cell division” and “cell proliferation”. The results obtained from these studies may be the basis for further molecular analyses.