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ProAKAP4 as a new marker of post-thaw fertility of bovine spermatozoa

Gandjeto, Mahugnon
(2023)

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Gandjeto_05572001_2023.pdf
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Details

Supervisors
Donnay, Isabelle
Faculty
Faculté des bioingénieurs
Degree label
Master [120] : bioingénieur en sciences agronomiques, à finalité spécialisée
Abstract
Assessing bull fertility is critical to achieve a high success rate of artificial insemination. Over the years, several indicators of sperm quality have been tested to improve the predictability of bull fertility. One of them, the ProAKAP4 protein, has gained attention lately for its role in reproduction as precursor of the AKAP4 (A-kinase anchoring protein 4) and its abundant expression in mammalian sperm. This study aims at exploring the predictive ability of the ProAKAP4 as marker of fertility of Belgian Blue bull (BBB), the predominant breed in Belgium. To that end, various ELISA experiments were conducted to measure the concentration of ProAKAP4 using a sample of 19 frozen-thawed semen collected from 15 BBBs. In addition, we exploited a dataset containing the semen quality parameters and the 56-day non-return rate (NRR) to analyze their relationship with the measured ProAKAP4 concentration. Our experiment showed that the ProAKAP4 concentrations of the semen samples varied between 6.8 and 164.1ng/10 million spz . Moreover, we did not find a significant relationship at 5% level between the ProAKAP4 concentration and the non-return rate. Our analysis based on standard motility parameters (ALH, VCL, VSL and VAP) yield similar results. These preliminary findings on Belgian Blue bull, suggest further investigations to understand better the specificity of this breed with respect to the ProAKAP4 protein.