The Effect of Penicillin on the Vitality of Bull Spermatozoa

Abstract

Antibiotic supplementation into semen extenders is an important way to control several microorganisms that can affect semen quality by their presence. The objective of the present work is to estimate the effect of two different concentrations (300 µg/mL and 600 µg/mL) of penicillin on the selected quality parameters of spermatozoa collected from bulls (motility, mitochondrial activity, acrosome integrity and membrane integrity) after 0, 2 and 24 h of in vitro culture. Sperm motion was examined using HTM IVOS computer-aided sperm analysis (CASA), cell viability was assessed with the metabolic activity (MTT) assay. The acrosomal integrity was evaluated following the fast green – rose bengal staining protocol and the eosin – nigrosin staining method was used to assess the functional integrity of the sperm membrane. Our results indicate that penicillin at lower amount significantly (p>0.05) decreased the sperm motility, mitochondrial activity and membrane integrity after 24 h of in vitro culture. Supplementation of higher doses of this substance led to a significant decrease of the sperm motion during 0, 2 (p>0.05) as well as after 24 h (p>0.01), of the viability after 2 h (p>0.05) and 24 h (p>0.01), of the acrosomal integrity after 24 h (p>0.05) and of the membrane integrity at 24 h (p>0.001) too. We can consider, that the effect of penicillin addition to bovine spermatozoa during in vitro incubation is time and dose dependent.