Abstract: The present study were designed to examine the developmental competence of preimplantational embryos derived from in vitro fertilization, parthenogenetic activation and somatic cell nuclear transfer in pig, and to evaluate the quality of porcine blastocysts derived from IVF, PA and SCNT. In addition, the effects of porcine zygote medium 3 (PZM-3) and North Carolina State Medium 23 (NCSU-23) on the developmental potential on the porcine PA embryos (PAEs) and SCNT (NTEs) embryos was also investigated. The results are as follows: ① for the cleavage rate, no significant difference was observed among IVF embryos (IVFEs), PAEs and NTEs (72.0％，66.0％ and 63.5％, p>0.05), meanwhile for the blastocyst formation rate, no significant difference was obtained neither (11.0％，22.6％ and 16.9％, p>0.05). However, for the quality of blastocysts, i.e. the ratio of inner cell mass (ICM) to total cell number, the IVFEs and NTEs were both superior to PAEs（0.448％, 0.356％ vs. 0.122％, p<0.05）. ② as for PAEs, the blastocyst rate was significantly higher when cultured in PZM-3 than cultured in NCSU-23（35.4％ vs. 22.6％， p<0.05）; while as for NTEs, similar results of PZM-3 and NCSU-3 in supporting blastocyst formation were observed （26.6％ vs. 21.1％， p>0.05）, although the cleavage rate was obviously higher in PZM-3 group than NCSU-23 group（47.5％ vs. 63.5％， p<0.05）. In conclusion, ①the poorest quality of blastcysts was generally observed in PAEs; ② the ideal culture medium for PAEs may not be necessarily beneficial to NTEs.

Key words: pig, in vitro fertilization, somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenetic activation, in vitro culture