Abstract
The evaluation of male fertility traditionally has centered on semen analysis describing semen volume, sperm density, morphology, motility and progression. Unfortunately, results from such analyses correlate poorly with fertility except in the extreme cases of azoospermia or asthenospermia. This poor correlation has forced attention to direct measurements of sperm function. Presently several bioassays are available for this purpose including in vivo sperm penetration of cervical mucus (the post coital or Sims-Huhner test), the in vitro capillary tube penetration test (with bovine or mid-cycle human cervical mucus) and sperm-egg interaction systems. At least two in vitro sperm-egg interaction assays have been described in addition to the fertilization of human eggs. In one, sperm are incubated with non-living human oocytes and the ability of sperm to penetrate the zona pellucida is measured (Overstreet and Hembree, 1976). The other, the zona-free hamster egg bioassay, utilizes the living naked egg of the hamster and sperm-egg fusion is the measured parameter (Yanagamachi et al., 1976).
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Wolf, D.P., Sokoloski, J.E. (1984). Fertility Potential Evaluation with the Zona-Free Hamster Egg Bioassay. In: Wolf, D.P., Quigley, M.M. (eds) Human in Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4712-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4712-5_14
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