STUDY QUESTION Does CatSper have a role in the achievement of human sperm motility and in the Progesterone (P)-induced acrosome reaction (AR)? SUMMARY ANSWER CatSper1 expression is associated with human sperm progressive motility and the P-induced AR; it may have a role in the pathogenesis of asthenozoospermia. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY Knockout mice for any of the Catsper family genes fail to ...

Sperm morphological analysis (SMA) is an essential step in diagnosing male infertility. Using images of human sperm cells, this research proposes a unique sequential deep-learning method to detect abnormalities semen samples. The proposed technique identifies and examines several components sperm. In order conduct study, we used the online Modified Human Morphology Analysis (MHSMA) dataset cont...

To investigate a possible common environmental exposure that may partially explain the observed decrease in human semen quality, we correlated seminal plasma and blood cadmium levels with sperm concentration and sperm motility. We studied three separate human populations: [Group 1] infertility patients (Long Island, NY), [Group 2] artificial insemination (AI) donors (Rochester, NY), and [Group ...

Fertilization involves cell-cell fusion of a sperm with the oocyte. This fusion restores the diploid genome, activates the oocyte, and initiates embryonic development. The identification of proteins mediating the fusion of sperm with oocyte plasma membrane (oolemma) is important to a deeper knowledge of fertilization. Defects in sperm-oocyte fusion may account for some form of human infertility...

Proteins known to function during cell-cell communication and exocytosis in neurons and other secretory cells have recently been reported in human sperm. Synapsins are a group of proteins that have been very well characterized in neurons, but little is known about synapsin function in other cell types. Based upon previous findings and the known function of synapsin, we tested the hypothesis tha...

BACKGROUND A key role of estrogens in human sperm biology has been recently suggested by aromatase and estrogen receptor detection in human testicular germ cells and ejaculated spermatozoa. However, the involvement of these hormones in the sperm maturation process is still not defined. The aim of this work was to investigate the expression of estrogen receptors, ER-alpha and ER-beta, in human e...

Mammalian spermatozoa must undergo a post-ejaculatory period of maturation, known as capacitation, before they can engage in the process of fertilization. Studies in the mouse have established that capacitation facilitates sperm-zona recognition via mechanisms that involve the appearance of tyrosine phosphorylated chaperone proteins on the sperm surface overlying the acrosome, the site of sperm...

In vitro incubation and centrifugation is known to decrease human sperm quality. In the human body, besides its antioxidant effects, L-carnitine (LC) facilitates the transport of activated fatty acids from the cytosol to the mitochondrial matrix. In this study, we investigated the effect of LC on human sperm motility, viability and DNA oxidation after incubation and centrifugation, following th...

The mammalian zona pellucida surrounding ovulated eggs mediates sperm binding at fertilization, provides a postfertilization block to polyspermy, and facilitates passage of pre-implantation embryos down the oviduct. Although the three zona proteins (ZP1, ZP2, ZP3) are well conserved, mammalian fertilization is relatively specific and human sperm do not bind to the mouse zona pellucida. There ar...

BACKGROUND Mouse oocytes can be used in conjunction with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) as a technique to permit chromosomal analysis of human sperm. However, chromosomes derived both from the human sperm and the mouse oocyte appear simultaneously following ICSI. The present study focused on evaluating whether or not previously enucleated mouse oocytes are usable for the analysis of hu...