New Filly for Frenchmans Guy and Success for the Vet World

Dr. Sylvia Bedford-Guaus' laboratory at Cornell University, College of Veterinary Medicine, is one of few in the U.S. with the expertise to harvest and handle mare oocytes (eggs). In a testament to her skill and that of her collaborators at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine, Mira, a filly born August 4, 2009, trots happily in a pasture in Binghamton, N.Y., although her dam died almost a year ago. Mira is the first known foal to be born after shipment of oocytes, collected post mortem, to a laboratory for fertilization.

Bedford-Guaus and her laboratory team, Dr. Lori McPartlin and Stephanie Twomey, made use of special tools and their expertise from years of research to scrape the wall of each follicle in each of the two ovaries obtained from Mira's biological mother, Rebaqua, who died after suffering from a ruptured intestine.

"The process is time-sensitive and very intricate," said Bedford-Guaus, explaining that oocytes can only be seen microscopically and must be collected from the ovary within a few hours. "There were other approaches, such as shipping the entire ovary, but none that could offer the success rates we had with this procedure."

After dissecting the ovaries, Bedford-Guaus searched for the oocytes under a dissecting microscope and washed them in a special medium. The process took over three hours "racing against the clock" according to Bedford-Guaus to get the oocytes packaged for overnight shipment to Dr. Katrin Hinrichs' Equine Embryo Laboratory at Texas A&M University. In Texas, the oocytes were incubated in a medium that would stimulate them to mature, and the mature oocytes were fertilized with frozen-thawed sperm from the third-ranked barrel-racing stallion in the nation, Frenchmans Guy. This procedure, performed by Dr. Young-Ho Choi, used a micromanipulation technique termed intracytoplasmic sperm injection. The fertilized eggs were cultured for 7 days, and developed embryos were then sent to Dr. David Hartman, at the Hartman Equine Reproduction Center, Whitesboro, Texas, who transferred them to a surrogate mare that was at the right stage of the cycle to carry a pregnancy.

Ultimately, Bedford-Guaus collected 11 oocytes; of these, two had already died. Of the nine shipped to Hinrichs' laboratory, five matured; two developed to the transferrable stage after fertilization; and one developed into a healthy foal.

Kristin Contro owned Rebaqua, a 14-year-old Quarter Horse. When Rebaqua died, Contro knew that both her memory and her genes should be passed on.

"Because there are so many horses in the world, prior to Rebaqua I've never felt it was necessary to breed a horse," said Contro, who began riding when she was 10 and has owned more than 10 horses. "Rebaqua was as close to perfect as you could get. She was bred really well, so her genes were superb. Her confirmation was perfect. And, she was a champion barrel racer. I am hopeful that her foal will also have her heart. That's not something you can breed for. They either have it or they don't."