Boar and season effects on some parameters of semen fertilizing potential

Abstract

In order to determine the more accurate fertile potential of sperm, it seems that the conventional parameters of boar semen quality (the ejaculate volume, sperm concentra­tion, progressive motility, percentage of live sperm and of those with intact acrosomal mor­phology) are insufficient. Since recently, there have been numerous studies proving that protein concentration in sperm plasma has high positive correlation with boar fertile po­tential. The research objective was to determine the effect of boars as well as the season on the variation of protein content in the sperm plasma. For the research there were used spermal fractions of 2 boars with high (V-boar) and 2 boars with low (N-boar) protein con­tent in spermal plasma. The ejaculates of boars were taken once a week, for a month, during one year (4 × 12 = 48 ejaculates per boar). For protein analysis in the spermal plas­ma, the samples were prepared by centrifugation. The ejaculate volume, protein concen­tration and progressive motility varied considerably (p 0.01) protein content in sperm plasma (V-boars: 4 to 4.5% in warm and cold season; N-boars: 2.3 do 2.6% in warm and 2.3 to 2.5% in cold season). The obtained results showed that measurement of protein con­tent in boar sperm plasma could be a useful method for their ranking, based on fertile po­tential of fresh semen.

Keywords

• protein content
• fertility of sperm
• boar
• season