BACKGROUND No commercially licensed vaccine or treatment is available for dengue fever, a potentially lethal infection that impacts millions of lives annually. New tools that target mosquito control may reduce vector populations and break the cycle of dengue transmission. Male mosquito seminal fluid proteins (Sfps) are one such target since these proteins, in aggregate, modulate the reproductio...

The epididymis is a long, tightly coiled tube within the lumen of which sperm matures. Sperm maturation involves morphological and biochemical changes in the sperm plasma membrane in response to epididymal secretions and their various proteins. Some of these proteins become outer membrane components while others become integral membrane proteins; transfer of some proteins to the sperm plasma me...

Mature spermatozoa have highly condensed DNA that is essentially silent both transcriptionally and translationally. Therefore, post translational modifications are very important for regulating sperm motility, morphology, and for male fertility in general. Protein sumoylation was recently demonstrated in human and rodent spermatozoa, with potential consequences for sperm motility and DNA integr...

Spermatozoa are more efficient at supporting normal embryonic development than spermatids, their immature, immediate precursors. This suggests that the sperm acquires the ability to support embryonic development during spermiogenesis (spermatid to sperm maturation). Here, using Xenopus laevis as a model organism, we performed 2-D Fluorescence Difference Gel Electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) and mass sp...

Certain sperm components labeled with fluorescein isothiocyanate or its radioactive derivative, 125I-diiodofluorescein isothiocyanate (125IFC), are transferred at fertilization to the egg, where they persist throughout early cleavage stages at a localized site in the embryo cytoplasm (Gabel, C. A., E. M. Eddy, and B. M. Shapiro, 1979, Cell, 18:207-215; Gundersen, G. G., C. A. Gabel, and B. M. S...

Fertilization is a cell-cell recognition process that occurs between two distinct cells: a small asymmetric and motile sperm cell and a large and nonmotile egg. The stages of fertilization can be divided into four processes: 1) sperm preparation, 2) sperm-egg recognition and binding, 3) sperm-egg fusion and 4) fusion of sperm and egg pronuclei and activation of the zygote. The specific structur...

The monoclonal anti-phosphotyrosine antibody (PTA) recognized proteins related to relative molecular mass regions of 94,000 +/- 3000 and 46,000 +/- 3000 Mr on Western blots of detergent-solubilized non-capacitated human sperm extract (HSE). The pattern of phosphorylation at tyrosine residues depended upon the physiological state of the sperm cells. At least six protein bands corresponding to fo...

Mammalian spermatozoa must mature in the epididymis before they can fertilize an egg. It is known that modification of the protein composition of the sperm surface is an important part of the maturation process. In this paper, we present data on two related glycoproteins that can be extracted from mature but not immature spermatozoa. Cell surface radioiodination has shown that these proteins ar...

Immunological sperm sexing is one of the desirable choices to separate X and Y sperm. The basic concept of immunological technique is based on the different proteins on the surface of X and Y sperms. To investigate the sperm surface proteins, proteomic investigation using 2 dimensional gel (2D-gel) electrophoresis technique has been applied. The initial step, protein extraction is very importan...