BACKGROUND Varicocelectomy is considered as standard treatment for male infertility for clinical varicocele. The aim of this study is to address the effects of varicocelectomy on semen parameters, chromatin packaging, and pregnancy outcome. MATERIALS AND METHODS This retrospective study was carried out between June 2006 and February 2011 on 145 infertile men with grade II or III varicocele. M...

Sperm chemoattraction in invertebrates can be sufficiently robust that one can place a pipette containing the attractive peptide into a sperm suspension and microscopically visualize sperm accumulation around the pipette. Sperm chemoattraction in vertebrates such as frogs, rodents and humans is more difficult to detect and requires quantitative assays. Such assays are of two major types - assay...

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is an extremely timeconsuming and tedious procedure in cases of oligozoospermia, because it is difficult to obtain a sufficient number of motile sperms. To circumvent this difficulty, we previously developed a microfluidic device to increase sperm concentration and reduce time required for ICSI. Here, we improved this device by carefully optimizing its di...

A variety of methods exist for counting sperm. Since the introduction of semen analysis, one of these methods, the hemocytometer, has been regarded as the gold standard by andrology laboratories and the World Health Organization (WHO, 1999). The flexible features of this approach, involving fixation and immobilization of sperm, dilution of highly concentrated samples, and the counting of sperm ...

Background: Mammalian sperm are not ready to fertilize oocyte immediately after ejaculation. Sperm achieve this ability after undergoing the processes of capacitation and hyperactivation. Hyperactivation refers to a change in the motility pattern of the sperm. Pharmacological reagents and physical-mechanical forces have been used in sperm from a variety of species. Hydrostatic pressure is a cru...

This study was designed to assess the reproducibility of the computer-assisted semen analysis (CASA) system. Semen specimens from 41 suspected subfertile patients were analysed on two identical Hamilton-Thorn Motility analysers (HTM, model 2030, version 7). Specimens were analysed after liquefaction at 37 degrees C for 30 min on two HTMs adjusted to the same gate settings and by using the same ...

Background: There are multiple diagnostic tests and procedures are available for diagnosis of infertility but semen analysis still is considered as most valuable diagnostic test for investigation of infertility.it is equally important that the semen analysis should be performed by experienced and expert person by proper technique. Biochemical analysis seminal fluid provide valuable information ...

Mesoscale structures (microns dimensions, nL-pL volumes) have been designed and fabricated in silicon for use in various analytical tasks. We studied sperm motility and performed sperm selection in channels (80 microns wide x 20 microns deep), branching structures (40 microns wide x 20 microns deep, eight bifurcations), and channels containing barriers (7 microns feature size). Sperm-cervical m...

A new form of chamber for studying chemotaxis, similar in principle to the Zigmond chamber, allows the behaviour of the cells in a linear concentration gradient to be observed directly. The chamber was developed mainly for studying chemotaxis in fibroblasts using interferometric microscopy and the main design criteria were that it should have better optical characteristics, a higher dimensional...