Dear Juan,

The effective catecholamine on bovine spermatozoa is the "Norepinephrine, NE" according to this study (cited 23 times acc. to Scopus):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12002437

You can find the possible mechanisms of action of NE on bovine spermatozoa in this report too. If you cannot download this report please tell me.

Dr. Saadeldin

Thank you for your help. I can download the article without problems.

Do you have any experience handling fresh and frozen-thawed equine semen to develop a sperm penetration assay and a sperm binding assay using bovine oocytes?

Sorry Juan, I have no experience with equine semen.

Good luck.

Dr. Saadeldin

Do you think that is better use the spTALP protocol or use Swim-up protocol to capacitate bovine semen during a FIV trial. We have some problems with semen when we use spTALP or Swim-up protocols.

I appreciate your opinion.

Hi Juan,

sperm TALP works well with frozen thawed bull sperm. We usually do IVF and embryo culture up to blastocyst stage with very good rates just washing the sperm with sperm TALP with BSA.

Moreover we add phe-mix in the fertiliztion wells at the time of insemination to better capacitate sperm. Phe mix consists of penicillamine, hypothaurine and epinephrine. Thus also epinephrine is active on bull sperm but I do not know through which mechanisms.

Dr. Gualtieri

Thank you for your answer.

And for buffalo semen, can i use spTALP?

How it's your experience washing bovine sperm with PVA (Polyvinyl-alcohol) instead use BSA?

Juan, I think you can use the same sperm TALP recipe for buffalo sperm but I would check it on pubmed. PVA is ok for preventing sperm agglutination instead of BSA. I have used PVA for sperm washing but then I resuspended the pellet in medium with BSA before insemination. Fertilization medium also needs BSA (efaf).

Roberto

Thank you Dr. Gualtieri