The various sperm cell types present in a simple ejaculate differ in their motility and morphology. However, little is known about the nuclear maturity of these sperm cells and their relationship with morphological and motile characteristics. Protamines are considered a good marker of sperm nuclear maturity since they are added to the DNA in the last stage of spermatogenesis. We have analyzed t...

In France, assisted reproductive technology (ART) for hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected patients is now subject to strict control after the publication of recent guidelines. Infertile serodiscordant couples (HCV-viraemic men and their seronegative female partners) require special care to carried out in designated 'viral risk' laboratories. Twelve sequential semen samples taken from an HCV chroni...

BACKGROUND In natural conception only a few sperm cells reach the ampulla or the site of fertilization. This population is a selected group of cells since only motile cells can pass through cervical mucus and gain initial entry into the female reproductive tract. In animals, some studies indicate that the sperm selected by the reproductive tract and recovered from the uterus and the oviducts ha...

BACKGROUND A key role of estrogens in human sperm biology has been recently suggested by aromatase and estrogen receptor detection in human testicular germ cells and ejaculated spermatozoa. However, the involvement of these hormones in the sperm maturation process is still not defined. The aim of this work was to investigate the expression of estrogen receptors, ER-alpha and ER-beta, in human e...

objective: adiponectin and its receptors (adipor1 and adipor2), known as adiponectin system, have some proven roles in the fat and glucose metabolisms. several studies have shown that adiponectin can be considered as a candidate in linking metabolism to testicular function. in this regard, we evaluated the correlation between sperm mrna abundance of adiponectin and its receptors, with sperm mot...

INTRODUCTION The swim up and the density-gradient centrifugation are the two main techniques which are used to separate the viable motile sperm fraction in the assisted reproductive technology. However, there are several published studies about these methods, but there is no sufficient evidence for recommending the superiority of one of them. This study was designed to study the efficiency of t...

The detection of chemotaxis-related changes in the swimming behavior of mammalian spermatozoa in a spatial chemoattractant gradient has hitherto been an intractable problem. The difficulty is that the fraction of responsive cells in the sperm population is very small and that the large majority of the cells, though non-responsive, are motile too. Assessment of the chemotactic effects in a spati...

BACKGROUND Reducing the percentage of sperm anomalies in insemination samples remains a goal to be achieved in the intra-cytoplasmic sperm insemination (ICSI) procedure. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of density gradient centrifugation (DGC) and Zeta methods to recover sperm with intact chromatin, and to evaluate whether the combined DGC/Zeta procedure improved ICSI outcom...

BACKGROUND It has been claimed that by using different washing methods, the sperms can be separated according to size, motility, density, chromosomal content and surface markings and charge. These methods also reduce sperm chromatin deficiencies and screen the sperms before applying in assisted reproduction techniques. OBJECTIVE This study compared simple density gradient methods and a combin...