Experimental strategies towards increasing intracellular mitochondrial activity in oocytes: A systematic review

Purpose: The mitochondrial complement is critical in sustaining the earliest stages of life. To improve the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), current methods of interest were evaluated for increasing the activity and copy number of mitochondria in the oocyte cell. Methods: This covered the researches from 1966 to September 2015. Results: The results provided ten methods that can be studied individually or simultaneously. Conclusion: Though the use of these techniques generated great concern about heteroplasmy observation in humans, it seems that with study on these suggested methods there is real hope for effective treatments of old oocyte or oocytes containing mitochondria! problems in the near future. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. and Mitochondria Research Society. All rights reserved.