Bioscientifica Proceedings

Although cryopreservation of boar semen for artificial insemination (Al) was developed 35 years ago, cryopreservation conditions and Al strategies are still considered sub-optimal. Al with excessive numbers of frozenthawed sperm (5-6 x 109 cells), still does not achieve fertility levels similar to Al using liquid semen because of reduced sperm survival. Frozenthawed (FT) spermatozoa have therefore not been the preferred option for commercial breeding programme...

Despite the great potential of sperm technologies such as sperm cryopreservation and sperm sex sorting for the improvement of different aspects of swine production, artificial insemination with fresh or stored semen is currently the only sperm technology used at a commercial scale in the pig industry. The lower reproductive performance associated with the use of these sperm technologies is the reason for such limited use. Since optimal characteristics are required for su...

Abstract unavailable© 2013 Context Products Ltd...

During ejaculation in the boar, sperm cohorts emitted in epididymal cauda fluid are sequentially exposed and resuspended in different mixtures of accessory sex gland secretion. This paper reviews the relevance of such unevenly composed fractions of seminal plasma (SP) in vivo on sperm transport and sperm function and how this knowledge could benefit boar semen processing for artificial insemination (Al). The firstly ejaculated spermatozoa (first 10 ml of the spe...