According to Hamburger and Hamilton stages of chick embryo development (HH), HH10 occurs at 33-38h of egg incubation. Hence, to get HH10 from 11am to 4 pm, one should start eggs incubation around 2 am (or vise versa). The temperature of incubation is 37.8-38 C. Does anybody know the way (e.g. lower incubation temperature) that will slow down the embryo development, but will not affect it? Does anyone know the equipment that will allow you to turn on incubation at night automatically? We have the Octagon 40 Advance EX Incubator with cooling function (above 20 oC only).
While I was working with chicken embryos I timed the incubation precisely. Don't change the incubation temperature too much. There's always the risk of inducing embryonic death or unwanted stress. I believe using a normal programmable power timer can help you. Either that or put your eggs in the incubator before going to bed...
Thank you, Alexandre.
I will appreciate you comment on this as well:
1) If I use normal programmable power timer, shall I keep eggs in incubator at room temperature? I am getting eggs previously stored at 16oC. Temperature in incubation room is set to 19 oC. Basically, I need (8-6)h delay between storage at 16oC and incubation at 38oC. Would you suggest to keep eggs in incubator (it is in the incubation room) before the incubator is turned on? Will it be OK for the embryo?
Thank you again,
Kateryna
The main problem of using a timer with an incubator is actually how long does it take for the incubator to reach the 37-38oC. If you manage to time that then you'll know how much do you have to add to the incubation time after the timer switches on the incubator.
We always preferred the hard way and someone would either stay in the lab 'til midnight or I'd get up very early and started to work with the embryos late in the evening.
I've done this more than 10 years ago but I can check my old lab books for some tricks on this.
We also use a 24 hour programmable timer for overnight incubations. For incubations over the weekend you can also use a 7-day digital programmable timer (e.g. start 5pm Saturday, stop 9am Monday). As Alexandre says, you need to take account of the incubator's warm-up time which you can test easily before incubating your eggs. If your lab is not air-conditioned (ours isn't) then warm-up time will vary with seasonal changes in ambient temperature, so you may need to re-test and adjust accordingly. Timing incubation-start works very well, but I would avoid using a timer to stop incubations as the incubator is likely to take much longer to cool-down than to warm-up, and your embryos will continue to develop for quite some time.
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