Abstract: The death of early embryo development will bring huge economic losses in animal husbandry, especially for dairy production of cattle. Thus, it has an extremely important value to study the process of early embryonic development. In our study, one dataset of gene expression was chosen from the public database of GEO, which was related to bovine preimplantation development. Significance and clustering analyses were used to study the genome expression patterns of each stage during bovine preimplantation development. The whole process was assigned to three main groups. The waves of significant gene expression in each stage indicated that both 8-cell and 16-cell stages played an important role during the process of bovine preimplantation development. Further functional analysis and pathway analysis revealed that some major factors and related pathways are required for distinctive developmental stages.

Key words: early embryos, bovine, gene expression profiles, regulatory mechanism