PDF《In vitro Fertilization》

2014 by Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. * Corresponding Author: Hyuk Song. Tel: +82-43-840-3522, Fax: +82-43- 842-3522, E-mail: [email protected]

1 Department of Animal Science, College of Agriculture, Chungbuk National University, Choung-ju 361-763, Korea.

2 R&

D Team, Darby Genetics Inc. Anseong 456-915, Korea.

3 Department of Animal Science and Biotechnology, Sangji Youngseo College, Wonju 220-713, Korea.

4 Department of Horse, Companion and Wild Animal Science, College of Animal Science, Kyungpook National University, Sangju 742-711, Korea. Submitted Mar. 20, 2014;

Revised Apr. 24, 2014;

Accepted May 27,

2014 Lee et al. (2014) Asian Australas. J. Anim. Sci. 27:1417-1425

1418 they cannot be used as reliable predictors of fertilizing ability (Glass and Ericsson, 1979;

Blasco, 1984;

Bostofte et al., 1984;

Foldesy et al., 1986;

Hoing et al., 1986;

Amann, 1989). Fertilization disorders due to poor sperm quality result in huge monetary loss in both AI centers and swine farms. To avoid this kind of unpredicted economic loss, a functional assessment of sperm quality is necessary. Several methods have been developed such as cervical mucus penetration, oocyte penetration assay, and measurement of acrosin activity (World Health Organization, 1992). However, these methods require labor, and time consuming and specialized equipment that restrict field applications. The common sperm defect that prevent normal fertilization through AI in large animal is an acrosome defect, the acrosomes are knobbed, ruffled, and incomplete (Chenoweth, 2005). The acrosome defect-mediated infertility has been reported in human (Aitken et al., 1990;

Moretti et al., 2005), boars, bulls, stallions, rams, and dogs (Nicander and Bane, 1966;

Hurtgen and Johnson, 1982;

Toyama and Itoh, 1993;

Soderquist, 1998;

Chenoweth, 2005;

Santos et al., 2006). Identification of defective spermatozoa in early stage before AI is important for maintaining semen quality and good prolificacy. In this study, the fertilization ability and detailed sperm motion characteristics, besides total motility and viability, from normal and low breeding grade boars were compared to identify the specific motion characteristics and possible structural defect in sperm morphology of the low breeding grade boar that can be easily applied as a parameter to exclude low quality sperm in AI centers. MATERIALS AND METHODS Animal selection and preparation of semen Normal and low breeding grade boars were selected from Darby genetics Inc. (Anseong, Korea) on the basis of AI breeding performance. The three selected boars were Landrace pigs. As shown in Table 1, semen from boar number

2012 showed a pregnancy rate of 49.7%, but semen from boar number

2004 and

2023 showed pregnancy rates greater than 70% by AI. Although delivery rates were approximately 50% for all boars, the average litter size and suckling piglets from boar

2012 were lower than those of boar

2004 and

2023 (Table 1). Based on these breeding performances, boar number

2004 and

2023 were regarded as normal and boar number

2012 as a low-breeding grade animal. In addition, motion characteristics of sperm from boar

2012 were compared to motion characteristics of sperm from boar