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. ...

When females copulate with multiple males, paternity is determined by the competitive ability of a male to access females and by the ability of its ejaculates to out-compete those of other males over fertilization. The relationship between the social competitiveness of a male and the fertilizing quality of its sperm has therefore crucial implications for the evolution of male reproductive strat...

The inheritance of non-genetic factors is increasingly seen to play a major role in ecology and evolution. While the causes and consequences of epigenetic effects transmitted from the mother to the offspring have received ample attention, much less is known about how variation in the condition of the father affects the offspring. Here, we manipulated the intensity of sperm competition experienc...

Abstract When populations become geographically isolated, they begin to diverge in various traits and at variable rates. The dynamics of such trait divergences are relevant for understanding evolutionary processes as local adaptation speciation. Here we examine sperm body structures a polygynandrous songbird, the alpine accentor (Prunella collaris) between two allopatric high-altitude populatio...

In Tribolium flour beetles and other organisms, individuals migrate between heterogeneous environments where they often encounter markedly different nutritional conditions. Under these circumstances, theory suggests that genotype-by-environment interactions (GEI) may be important in facilitating adaptation to new environments and maintaining genetic variation for male traits subject to directio...

Mammalian spermatozoa, particularly those of rodent species, are extremely complex cells and differ greatly in form and dimensions. Thus, characterization of sperm size and, particularly, sperm shape represents a major challenge. No consensus exists on a method to objectively assess size and shape of spermatozoa. In this study we apply the principles of geometric morphometrics to analyze rodent...

The nature of subfertility due to the male or inseminate is as complex as that of the female. Fertilization failure or failure in embryogenesis are both documented to be of seminal origin. Males also differ in the numbers of sperm required to reach their maximum fertilization rate. Males requiring more sperm would be considered to have compensable seminal deficiencies. These include a number of...

In order to study the genetic control of semen quality parameters, we derived a set of recombinant inbred (RI) mice from crosses between two inbred strains, KE and CBA/Kw, which differ significantly in gamete quality and fertility parameters. In this work, we used male mice from the two parental strains and from ten RI strains to map genes controlling quantitative traits such as sperm mitochond...