Metabolic activity of sperm cells: correlation with sperm cell concentration, viability and motility in the rabbit.

The resazurin reduction test (RRT) is a useful technique to assess the metabolic rate of sperm cells. RRT depends on the ability of metabolically active cells to reduce the non-fluorescent dye resazurin to the fluorescent resorufin. The aim of this study was to develop a vital fluorometric method to evaluate metabolic activity of rabbit sperm cells.

Daily exposure to summer circadian cycles affects spermatogenesis, but not fertility in an in vivo rabbit model.

Heat stress (HS) in mammals is a determining factor in the deterioration of spermatogenesis and can cause infertility. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of continuous summer circadian cycles on semen production, sperm cell features, fertility, prolificacy, and fecal cortisol metabolites from rabbits kept under an in vivo HS model. We split randomly 60 New Zealand White rabbits into two temperature-controlled rooms: The control group was maintained at comfort temperature (18 °C-22 °C) and an HS group, where the environmental temperature was programmed to increase from 22 °C to 31 °C and be maintained for 3 hours to this temperature at the central part of the day.

Biobanked Amphibian Samples Confirmed To Species Level Using 16S rRNA DNA Barcodes.

The DNA barcoding technique is often used as a tool for validating species identity in biobanks. In the case of amphibians, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene is reported to fulfill the requirements of a universal DNA barcoding marker. The 16S primers are designed to specifically bind to the 16S rRNA gene, which is a very well-conserved mtDNA gene sequence in amphibians.