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The graduate of the Catholic University of Maule, Sebastián Vergara, traveled to the United States for three months sponsored by the University of Massachusetts, thanks to an international linkage project.
The Leopardus guigna, known in Chile as the country cat or the Huiña cat, is a feline endemic to South America, it lives mainly in the center and south of Chile, and is currently on the red list of threatened species, being branded as “ Vulnerable”, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
To understand the molecular bases of fertility in felines compared to the murine model (with rodents), a team of researchers from different disciplines and universities in Chile and the United States created a project that aims to find the keys to improving conditions. and management of feline oocytes, in order to generate, in the future, strategies that ensure better in vitro fertilization and implantation rates in these animals, and then evaluate what has been learned in other species such as the traditional Leopardus guigna.
Collaborative and international science, which has academics from the University of Concepción (Dr. Felipe Aguilera), the University of Valparaíso (Dr. Karen Castillo), the University of Chile (Dr. Daniel Veraguas), the Catholic University of Maule (Dr. Ingrid Carvacho) and the University of Massachusetts (Dr. Rafael Fissore), looking for new mechanisms or to better understand how the fertilization process occurs in felines.
It was Dr. Carvacho who gave details of this collaboration. “The idea is to be able to understand the mechanisms that govern fertilization in felines and then, in a future project, to be able to extrapolate that information to what would be a species in danger of extinction, such as the Huiña cat in our area,” he commented.
“What happens is that in felines the success rate, once in vitro fertilization is done, then implantation is low,” stressed the director of the Ion Channels and Reproduction Laboratory of the Catholic University of Maule, anticipating that in The UCM carries out work with the murine model “but we believe that some of the factors that influence implantation and in vitro fertilization in felines could be different and it is relevant to understand these differences,” he stated.
Internship in Massachusetts
To analyze how true the hypotheses used by this group of researchers are, after being awarded a FOVI Linkage project financed by FONDECYT, Sebastián Vergara, a biotechnology engineer who graduated from UCM and is currently a research assistant at the Laboratory of Ion Channels and Reproduction of said house of study, traveled to the United States for three months, sponsored by UMASS Amherst.
Before his flight, he explained what his international internship is about. “We want to understand the mechanisms that are responsible for the maturation and activation of the oocyte and then extrapolate those experiments in cat oocytes to see if the mechanism is similar or if it has any different characteristics with the rodent oocyte,” he explained.
Working side by side with the research group of prominent international academic Dr. Rafael Fissore, the young professional added that “The idea is to learn new techniques and use cutting-edge equipment that does not exist in Chile, in addition to improving the English language,” he said. .
“As a laboratory we seek to understand how ionic flows, mainly Calcium, determine fertility in mammals. Initially, we thought it would be similar between rodents and felines, but we have realized that, although there are similarities, there are also many differences. We hope that our work contributes to a more complete knowledge of the molecular determinants of fertility in felines, and can be applied, in the future, to improvements in conservation protocols for species such as the güiña cat,” concluded Dr. Carvacho.
Credit: DIRCOM UCM.
