Background: Cigarette smoking is associated with impairment of testicular function. Nicotine is a major component of cigarette smoke.In the present study we aimed to study the effect of administration of nicotine-melatonin on sperm parameters in adult mouse. Materials and Methods: Male NMRI mice were divided into 4 groups: 1) control(normal saline) group 2) nicotine treated group 3) melatonin t...

Introduction: There are many tests that describe semen quality in the stallion which include sperm motility, morphology, and longevity of motility and determination of total sperm numbers. In addition, recently, the flow cytometer (FC) has been used to evaluate various sperm compartment following staining with specific fluorescent probes that bind to different compartments of the sperm. Our lab...

Male infertility affects at least 5% of reproductive age males. The most common pathology is a complex presentation of decreased sperm output and abnormal sperm shape and motility referred to as oligoasthenoteratospermia (OAT). For the majority of OAT men a precise diagnosis cannot be provided. Here we demonstrate that leucine-rich repeats and guanylate kinase-domain containing isoform 1 (LRGUK...

Direct measurements of microtubule sliding in the flagella of actively swimming, demembranated, spermatozoa have been made using submicron diameter gold beads as markers on the exposed outer doublet microtubules. With spermatozoa of the tunicate, Ciona, these measurements confirm values of sliding calculated indirectly by measuring angles relative to the axis of the sperm head. Both methods of ...

In human sperm motility analysis, sperm segmentation plays an important role to determine the location of multiple sperms. To ensure an improved segmentation result, the Laplacian of Gaussian filter is implemented as a kernel in a pre-processing step before applying the image segmentation process to automatically segment and detect human spermatozoa. This study proposes an intersecting cortical...

Selection to avoid inbreeding is predicted to vary across species due to differences in population structure and reproductive biology. Over the past decade, there have been numerous investigations of postcopulatory inbreeding avoidance, a phenomenon that first requires discrimination of mate (or sperm) relatedness and then requires mechanisms of male ejaculate tailoring and/or cryptic female ch...

Boar spermatozoa contain isoforms of both glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH, EC 1.2.1.12) and pyruvate kinase (PK, EC 2.7.1.40). The sperm-specific forms, GAPDH-S and PK-S, are tightly bound to cell structures. By immunofluorescence microscopy GAPDH-S and PK-S were localised in the principal piece of the boar sperm flagellum as well as in the acrosomal region of the sperm head and...

It is well known that the plasma membranes of mammalian spermatozoa undergo extensive remodeling during maturation in the epididymal duct. In this investigation, we have used fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) techniques to: 1) measure rates of lipid diffusion in the plasma membrane of mouse spermatozoa at different stages of maturation; 2) examine the effects of varying external...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of Ca, HCO3 and BSA on the in vitro capacitation-associated protein tyrosine phosphorylation, hyperactivation and acrosome reaction in guinea pig sperm. Caudal epididymal sperm were incubated in four different groups: modified TALP (Tyrode’s albumin lactate pyruvate) or TALP without one of the medium constituents (Ca, HCO3 and BSA). After incuba...

An oviduct-specific, estrus-associated glycoprotein (EAP) of 85-95 kDa is detectable in both conditioned medium (CM) from oviductal explants and cannula-derived oviductal fluid (ODF). The objectives of this study were to purify EAP from both ODF and CM, to characterize the glycosylation of EAP, and to localize binding of EAP on sperm. EAP was purified from ODF by ammonium sulfate precipitation ...