The male sterile mutation, misfire (mfr), of Drosophila melanogaster is a novel paternal effect, fertilization defective mutant that effects sperm head decondensation. mfr sperm were motile, appeared normal morphologically and were transferred to the female during copulation. However, less than 0.1% of eggs laid by females mated to mfr males hatched. Although mfr sperm entered eggs at a high fr...

The gender of the offspring is determined by the fertilizing sperm. Previous gender studies were based on washed sperm, but not on sperm in seminal plasma. The objective was to correlate motility parameters assessed during semen analyses with the offspring gender. For comparison, fixed sperm head DNA quantitated by Hoechst 33342 fluorescence microscopy was also analyzed. Forty-six patients unde...

This study was designed to compare the performance of the kits Diff-Quick, Hemacolor and Spermac for staining the spermatozoa of rainbow trout. Automated sperm morphology analysis (ASMA) was performed using two image analysis programs to determine the sperm measurements: head size (length, width, area and perimeter), shape (ellipticity, rugosity, elongation and regularity) and tail length. Diff...

Single structural defects involving the totality of ejaculated sperm are among rare cases of untreatable human male infertility. This form of infertility is of genetic origin and is generally transmitted as an autosomal recessive traits. Acrosome agenesis or globozoospermia results from perturbed expression of nuclear proteins or from an altered Golgi-nuclear recognition during spermiogenesis. ...

The alteration in the protein signatures of the testicular sperm during its epididymal sojourn makes it functionally competent for successful fertilization. The present study was undertaken to identify the proteins acquired on its 2 domains, that is, the head and the flagellum, during the epididymal transit using a differential proteomics approach. Testicular sperm proteome was compared with ca...

Tetramethylrhodamine-labelled microtubules were observed to move on rows of dynein arms of sea urchin sperm axonemes exposed by elastase-induced sliding disintegration. The microtubules moved towards the flagellar tip at a velocity of 3.1+/-2.1 microm second-1 (mean +/- s.d., n=53) in the presence of 0.1 mM ATP at 22 degrees C, but none moved towards the sperm head. We also examined the polarit...

We consider images of boar spermatozoa obtained with an optical phase-contrast microscope. Our goal is to automatically classify single sperm cells as acrosome-intact (class 1) or acrosome-damaged (class 2). Such classification is important for the estimation of the fertilization potential of a sperm sample for artificial insemination. We segment the sperm heads and compute a feature vector for...

Addit ion of either 25% or 50% bovine follicular fluid (FF) to Krebs Ringer phosphate buffer, with .5% fructose added (KRPF), maintained higher percentages (P<.05) of motile sperm throughout 9-hr incubation at 37 C than did 100% KRPF or 100% FF. Accelerated sperm moti l i ty and head-to-head agglutination of sperm cells were consistently observed in all diluents that contained FF. The percentag...

We consider images of boar spermatozoa obtained with an optical phase-contrast microscope. Our goal is to automatically classify single sperm cells as acrosome-intact (class 1) or acrosome-reacted (class 2). Such classification is important for the estimation of the fertilization potential of a sperm sample for artificial insemination. We segment the sperm heads and compute a feature vector for...

The salient phases of fertilization are gamete adhesion, membrane fusion, and internalization of the spermatozoon into the oocyte but the precise timeline and the molecular, membrane and cell mechanisms underlying these highly dynamical events are far from being established. The high motility of the spermatozoa and the unpredictable location of sperm/egg fusion dramatically hinder the use of re...