How much emphasis should you put on acrosome evaluation of a dose of semen?
At ReproQuest, we do not include the percent acrosomal damage in the viability calculation, the reason being is that we can’t determine if the cell was or is alive or dead. We base this on the fact that living sperm cells are theoretically acrosomally okay. We are associating acrosomal damage with cell destabilization and preeminent death some time shortly there after. From a viability standpoint we do not want to count a dead cell and an acrosomal damaged cell twice. Doing that would be a falsely negative representation of number of actual viable cells. That is why we simply state that NAR was conducted on non-living cells and is not included in viability estimates. It is a widely held scientific belief that the capacitation process which leads to an acrosome reaction is considered to be a controlled destabilization process which reduces the life span of sperm (Harrison, 1996.) No one knows exactly how the life span is affected, but we do know from frozen semen experiments (frozen-tha
