Sperm storage mechanisms in poultry

Turkey sperm lose viability within 8-18 h when stored as liquid semen using current methods and extenders. In contrast, turkey hens maintain viable, fertile sperm in their sperm storage tubules (SST) for 45 or more days following a single insemination. Our long-term objectives are to identify and characterize differentially expressed genes that may underlie this prolonged sperm storage and then use this information to develop improved methods for storing liquid turkey semen. We employed serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) to compare gene expression patterns in turkey SST recovered from hens after artificial insemination (AI) with extended semen (sperm AI) or extender alone (control AI). We constructed two separate SAGE libraries with SST RNA obtained from sperm and control AI hens. We used these libraries to generate 95,325 ten-base pair SAGE tags. These 95,325 tags represented 27,430 unique genes. The sperm and control AI libraries contained 47,663 and 47,662 tags representing 18,030 and 19,101 putative unique transcripts, respectively. Approximately 1% of these putative unique genes were differentially expressed (P

在采用现行方法及添加剂储存液态精子的情况下，火鸡精子在8-18小时内即丧失活力。相较之下，火鸡母鸡在单次人工授精后，能够在其精子储存管（SST）中维持具有活力的精子达45天或更久。本研究的长期目标在于识别并表征可能促成这种长期精子储存的差异性表达基因，进而利用这些信息开发出改进的液态火鸡精子储存方法。我们采用了连续基因表达分析（SAGE）技术，以比较人工授精后从母鸡回收的火鸡SST中，使用添加剂精子（精子AI）或仅使用添加剂（对照AI）处理的基因表达模式。我们构建了两个独立的SAGE文库，分别从精子AI和对照AI母鸡的SST中获取RNA。利用这些文库，我们生成了95,325个十碱基对的SAGE标签。这95,325个标签代表了27,430个独特的基因。精子AI和对照AI文库分别包含47,663和47,662个标签，代表着18,030和19,101个假定的独特转录本。其中，大约1%的假定独特基因表现出差异性表达（P