Recovery of preantral follicles from goat ovarian cortex through mechanical and enzymatic procedures

Ovaries (112) were collected from slaughtered goat from the slaughter house and preantral follicles from the ovarian cortex were retrieved by mechanical and enzymatic methods. Overall average weight, length, width and height of the ovaries were 0.92±0.04g, 1.58±0.02cm, 1.16±0.02cm and 0.72±0.01cm, respectively. Weight, length, width and height of the right ovaries were found to be higher than that of the left one. Total number of follicles on the surface per ovary was 7.5±0.4 and ranged from 7.4±0.6 (left ovaries) to 7.7±0.7 (right ovaries). The average numbers of primordial, primary and secondary follicles per ovary were 23965.2±613.0, 1862.1±73.5 and 46.9±1.1, respectively. The preantral follicles obtained with the enzymatic method were 1062.2±31.6, 61.6±21.3 and 1.9±0.2, respectively. It is concluded that preantral follicles can be successfully retrieved from the ovaries by simple mechanical procedure using slicing and pipetting followed by filtration which yielded large number of preantral follicles especially primordial follicles with low percentage of denuded oocytes.