Seminal Plasma Modulates Sperm Quality in the North American Bison (Bison bison) Across Breeding and Non-Breeding Seasons.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The overall goal of our research program is to develop methods to salvage the genetics of wood bison (Bison bison athabascae), a threathened species in Canada, using plains bison (Bison bison bison) as a model. The objective of the current study was to investigate the effects of reproductive seasonality on semen quality in bison bulls. In previous studies in our laboratory, sperm motility was significantly higher in the breeding versus non-breeding season for both wood and plains bison; however, there was no significant effect of season on motility of epididymal sperm from plains bison. Therefore, we hypothesized that composition of seminal plasma varied between breeding and non-breeding seasons, modulating sperm function. To test this hypothesis, protein profiles of seminal plasma were characterized with two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. There was differential expression of protein spots for both wood and plains bison across seasons. Using antibodies against proteins identified as bovine fertility markers, higher expression of BSP5 and TIMP-2 was confirmed in seminal plasma collected during the breeding season in wood and plains bison. To investigate the mechanism by which seminal plasma regulates sperm function, epididymal sperm from plains bison were mixed with seminal plasma collected from plains bison during either breeding or non-breeding seasons. Sperm were cryopreserved and subsequently evaluated. There was no significant difference between groups in sperm motility parameters (as determined by computer assisted sperm analysis). However, in sperm exposed to seminal plasma collected during the non-breeding season, tyrosine phosphorylation of sperm proteins (detected with immunoblotting) was increased; therefore, we inferred these sperm were more likely to undergo capacitation. In summary, there was differential expression of seminal plasma proteins across breeding and non-breeding seasons in North American bison, with higher expression of at least two bovine fertility-associated proteins during the breeding season. We concluded that seminal plasma-mediated modulation of sperm quality may contribute to reproductive seasonality in bison bulls. This research was supported by the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Program, through the provincial councils of Alberta, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon and British Columbia (Project #AB0122CO), the Government of Northwest Territories, and the Calgary Zoo. (platform)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".