Infertility affects one in six couples in the United Kingdom. Male infertility is now the single most common cause. Compared with animals, human conception is, at best, inefficient. From one act of coitus a man can eject some 500 million sperm, yet a mere hundred survivors will reach the ovum. As a result anything less than 20 million sperm per ml of ejaculate significantly reduces the chance o...

BACKGROUND A protocol for the chromosomal analysis of sperm samples with a severely reduced number of sperm cells was designed. METHODS A severe male factor condition was the main cause of infertility for 38 couples: 27 were oligoasthenoteratospermic (OAT) and 11 with non-obstructive azoospermia underwent testicular sperm extraction (TESE). A two-round fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH...

The majority of wild felids, as well as some domestic cats, have low sperm concentration in their ejaculates, and a high proportion of abnormal spermatozoa. We have employed several possible semen quality markers to further characterize cat epididymal sperm. Methods included possible apoptotic reporters, such as the annexin V assay to monitor exposure of phosphatidylserine (PS) on the outer lea...

The morphology of the sperm head has often been correlated with the outcome of in vitro fertilization, and has been shown to be the sole parameter in semen of value in predicting the success of intracytoplasmic sperm injection and intracytoplasmic morphologically selected sperm injection. In this paper, we have studied whether digital holographic microscopy (DHM) may be useful to obtain quantit...

BACKGROUND Apoptosis appears to have an essential role in the control of testis germ cell number and Fas expression has been reported in apoptotic spermatocytes and spermatids. We investigated if Fas (CD95) was present on ejaculated human sperm and any relationship between Fas on sperm and the apoptotic marker Syto16. METHODS Semen samples from 77 male partners of infertile couples were evalu...

background: sperm selection for icsi based on morphology and motility might not be relevant to chromatin integrity. thus sperm selection based on sperm characteristics has been suggested. objective: the aim of this study was to compare the efficiency of zeta method with routine density gradient centrifugation method (dgc) for the selection of sperm with higher dna integrity. materials and metho...

introduction: semen parameters and specially sperm morphology is used for the assessment of semen sample and for the prediction of the fertilization. however there is semen samples with normal sperm morphology but with hidden sperm chromatin anomalies. since sperm morphology and chromatin anomalies reduce the fertilization rat independently, the purpose of this study is to consider the relation...

Semen sample analysis is routinely performed by microscopical evaluation and manual techniques by laboratory operators; the analysis is affected by a wide imprecision related to variability among observers, influencing its clinical validity. Our aim was to automate sperm analysis with the use of flow cytometry for evaluation of cell counts and typing and with the use of a new membrane-permeant ...

Sperm examinations may be useful in both clinical and research settings, for investigating male fertility status as well as monitoring spermatogenesis during and following male fertility regulation and other interventions. Among the possible causes of male infertility, defects of sperm morphology represent an important factor that may explain decreased fertilizing potential of sperm. The limits...

In this study, we conducted a simultaneous analysis of sperm count and viability in rats by flow cytometry (FCM). Epididymal fluids were taken from the caudal epididymis of 12 to 13 week-old Sprague-Dawley rats. The fluids were weighed and mixed with Dulbecco's phosphate buffered saline (D-PBS). Propidium iodide, which can stain only dead sperm, was used to distinguish viable and dead sperm. Th...