Pregnancy, embryo-fetal development and nutrition: physiology around fetal programming

Introduction Experimental observations clearly indicate that during pregnancy, the pre-implantation phase is the period of the greatest vulne rability for the future embryo in relation to several endogenous and/or exogenous factors, including those nutritional ones [1-3]. In mice, the nutritional stress, during the pre-implantation phase, is often responsible of blastocyst death