The never-ending story of semen assessment: a multi parametric approach

Fertility increment is one of the main issues of livestock animals’ industry. The focus of my PhD was the optimization of semen assessment through different investigation techniques. Inspiring to human medicine, I focused on “male factor infertility”, a particular condition in which sperm with normal characteristics to routine evaluation leads to unsatisfying pregnancy rates. This fact highlights that clinical routine performed in semen laboratories is not always sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of semen fertility. The advent of the artificial reproduction technologies (ART) represents a huge step for the treatment of infertility. Nevertheless, for these to express their full potential, sperm must be of good quality. Microfluidics is a technology that, with comparable motility parameters, allow the selection of a sperm population with high fertility. The investigation of the intrinsic reasons that justify the higher fertility of one ejaculate compared to others is the aim of the so called “omics” technologies, that include genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Among these, we have been working on transcriptomics, and we confirmed that sperm differ in their mRNA content, and it can be modified by several features outside the cell. Oxidative stress represents a significant feature able to influence seminal plasma quality and sperm motility. The aim of this thesis is to understand if a multifactorial approach can ameliorate the assessment of semen quality and if it can be a possible way to identify the causes of male factor infertility.