As an undergraduate student it is very easy to get frustrated
when studying the basics. Organic Chemistry, Nutrition, or
Statistics feel like classes you just have to get through before
you can study bigger and better things. Plus you can get so bogged
down in details that you tend to lose sight of the big picture and
what you are working towards. So when I was given the opportunity
as part of my Animal Science 107 Honors course to help with embryo
transplants in sheep I jumped at it!
So first, let me give you a little background about embryo
transplants in sheep. The goal of this procedure is to create more
lambs from the genetically valuable females. Naturally a female
sheep, called a ewe, might have 14 lambs in her lifetime if she is
lucky. So as producers we want to greatly increase the number of
lambs from a given female. In order to do that we give the
valuable, donor ewe hormones that cause her to 'super-ovulate'
increasing the number of...
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