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Cells to Soul

The miracle of life before my eyes

By Belkie BluePublished 3 years ago 4 min read
2
Cattle Embryos through the Microscope

I have the best job in the world. I get to see life as not many do, but, before I get to that a little backstory of how I got here.

I grew up in a small country town in Australia, my Dad was a shearer and Mum a cleaner at the local school. I spent my childhood in shearing sheds and cleaning. I was always an ambitious child and decided early I was never going to work in the shearing sheds or be a cleaner. Fast forward to my first job, a trainee vet nurse for a little local mixed practice Veterinary Hospital. My first week on the job the manager promptly told me “don’t get a big head, being a vet nurse is nothing more than being a glorified cleaner”…and in a way she was correct, there is a lot of cleaning where animals are concerned. A couple years in general vet and the big boss came back from an extended overseas work venture, doing artificial breeding work, in sheep. Long story short, I ended up transferring over to work directly for him in the AI (artificial Insemination) centre, and guess where I spent most of my workdays…you guessed it, in the shearing sheds. It was fantastic job, travelling all over the state and country, making babies.

We would travel to client’s farms and AI ewes with semen collected from all over the world, it’s an amazing way of accessing superior genetics to improve herd performance, health, and production. Along the way I learnt many skills, collecting and freezing semen, export protocols, animal husbandry and working livestock effectively and low stress, the best thing I learnt was how to handle and process embryos, more on this soon.

I spent many years working in the sheep industry, after I left, I meandered around for a few years, doing different jobs and travelling to different places. I finally settled, got married and then…ended up working for a cattle vet after the marriage failed. I was back into the artificial work again.

The most humbling and amazing part of my work is the embryo collection and transfer. The process involves collecting the embryos and either freezing them in liquid nitrogen or transferring them fresh into recipient (surrogate) animals. I wont go into all the technical jargon, and the processes involved as this is not what this story is about. I do want to assure you that the animals are treated with the utmost respect, animal welfare is of top priority and all measure are taken to ensure the least amount of stress is put on the animals, because, if they are stressed or not looked after at the highest standard then you simply do not get good results, and that would be a no-win situation for everyone.

So once the embryos are flushed into the petri dish, I get to look at new life taking form under a microscope. It still gets me every time I look at them down the eyepieces, we all start like this, a little ball of cells, just floating around oblivious to anything. We all start the same way, sheep, horse, cow, human, at 5 days old (after ova fertilisation) were all just a bunch of cells, dividing away, growing cell by cell. The other fascinating and utterly amazing thing that happens is you can actually see the embryos growing and changing over a few hours while hanging out in the holding media. WOW

So, if we need to freeze the embryos, they are put through special fluids to ensure they survive the freezing and the thawing process. They are put into little straws with special identification plugs and then cooled down in a special cryochamber at a set rate. Once they have gone through this process of cooling, they are then plunged into liquid nitrogen which is -197 Celsius, that’s right Negative 197 degrees Celsius. They are then stored in special flasks and so long as they never run out of liquid nitrogen, they can survive in there forever, they are literally suspended in time. Sounds like some weird sci-fi story, doesn’t it?

When transferring the embryo’s, either fresh or frozen, the embryo is thawed (if it had been frozen) and through a quick and efficient process the embryo is deposited into the uterus of the recipient animal. The recipient will then carry the pregnancy as if it were her own, give birth and mother the calf until it is weaned. The peculiar thing about this is the recipient has no genetic influence on the calf at all, the calf is genetically related to the sire the donor was AI’ed to and the donor it was flushed out of. So, a shorthorn can give birth to a purebred Friesian, or a Murray Grey can give birth and raise a full blood Wagyu calf that was collected in say the USA and born in Australia.

The truly astonishing thing that happens in my line of work is when I go out the next year to the help transfer the next lot of embryos into the recipients, and there, playing, running and frolicking are the calves that I saw as embryo’s the year before, growing under the microscope, as real live little babies. It still, to this day, leaves me speechless and humbled at the pure miracle of life.

Science
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About the Creator

Belkie Blue

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