BACKGROUND Many factors may lead to sperm DNA damage. However, it is little known that the correlations of sperm DNA damage with obesity-associated markers, and reproductive hormones and lipids levels in serum and seminal plasma. METHODS In our prospective study, a total of 1 010 subfertile men, aged from 18 to 50 years old, were enrolled from August 2012 through June 2015. Their obesity-asso...

BACKGROUND The potential that adolescent chemotherapy can impact the epigenetic programming of the germ line to influence later life adult fertility and promote epigenetic inheritance was investigated. Previous studies have demonstrated a number of environmental exposures such as abnormal nutrition and toxicants can promote sperm epigenetic changes that impact offspring. METHODS Adult males a...

Environmental compounds including fungicides, plastics, pesticides, dioxin and hydrocarbons can promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult-onset disease in future generation progeny following ancestral exposure during the critical period of fetal gonadal sex determination. This study examined the actions of the pesticide methoxychlor to promote the epigenetic transgenerationa...

Modern livestock breeding is basically dependent on the proper use of semen for artificial insemination (AI) of females and of other reproductive biotechnologies such as the production of embryos in vitro for embryo transfer (IVP). Both these techniques have made possible not only the wide dissemination of genetic material onto breeding populations but also enhanced the selection of best sires,...

As the global population continues to grow, food demand will be reaching levels which current agricultural practices cannot meet. This projected combined with negative impacts of climate change on crop production calls for more careful breeding efforts develop better adapted plants tolerant fluctuations. Fortunately, development molecular biology techniques like genome, transcriptome and epigen...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to assess the relationship between apoptosis in human ejaculated spermatozoa, sperm morphology and the novel sperm deformity index (SDI). METHODS Semen specimens from 50 healthy donors were prepared by density-gradient centrifugation followed by incubating the prepared sperm with paramagnetic annexin V-conjugated microbeads and subjecting this to magnetic cell sort...

Infertility is an important aspect of human and animal reproduction and still presents with much etiological ambiguity. As fifty percent of infertility is related to the male partner, molecular investigations on sperm and seminal plasma can lead to new knowledge on male infertility. Several comparisons between fertile and infertile human and other species sperm proteome have shown the existence...

Genetic variation at 15 microsatellite DNA loci and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences (338bp) was examined in sperm whales collected during JARPNII from 2000 to 2013 in order to examine the effectiveness of these genetic markers for studies of stock structure in this species. Analyses of mtDNA and microsatellite markers in a total of 56 sperm whales (16 males; 40 females) confi...