This study was focused on specific biochemical and morphological characteristic of programmed cell death in pre-implantation embryos. For the assessment of the occurrence of spontaneous apoptosis in different species murine and porcine in vivo derived and bovine in vitro produced blastocyst were prepared. For the assessment of the incidence of induced cell death murine blastocyst were cultured in vitro with the addition of two apoptotic inductors -specifically effective TNF-a and nonspecifically effective actinomycin D. The incidence of spontaneous apoptosis in early blastocysts was relatively low -mouse embryos 0–2.5%, porcine embryos 0-1%, bovine embryos 1–10%. The proportion of blastocysts containing at least one apoptotic cell was >65% in mouse, >50% in porcine and almost 100% in bovine group. The presence of TNF-a (50ng/ml) and actinomycin D (50ng/ml) in culture media (24h culture) significantly increased apoptosis incidence in mouse blastocysts without affecting embryo growth. The effect of actinomycin D was evident even after 6h culture. Higher concentrations of inductors affected both apoptosis incidence and embryo growth and the damaging effect of actinomnycin D was considerably higher than the effect of TNF-a. Apoptotic cells showed identical morphological and biochemical features -nuclear fragmentation and the presence of specifically degraded DNA (TUNEL) and active caspase3 - after the treatment of both inductors.