Effect of sperm pretreatment with glutathione and membrane destabilizing agents lysolecithin and Triton X‐100, on the efficiency of bovine intracytoplasmic sperm injection

Contents Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is an assisted reproduction tool with several applications. Its effectiveness in bovines is lower than that in other species, mainly because of difficulties in the decondensation of the sperm nucleus after injection, and the presence of the acrosome and the plasma membrane which remain intact in this procedure. In this study, we assessed the effect of lysolecithin (LL) and Triton X‐100 (TX), in combination with glutathione (GSH) as sperm pretreatments prior to ICSI. The GSH‐LL and GSH‐TX groups showed 0% of spermatozoa with intact membrane (SYBR 14+/PI), in comparison with the control (63.3%) and GSH (65.7%) groups. The proportions of spermatozoa with damaged acrosome membrane in the GSH‐LL, GSH‐TX, GSH and control groups were 46%, 35.9%, 10.5% and 7.5%, respectively. Sperm chromatin decondensation analysis showed that the groups incubated for 3 hr with GSH presented greater decondensation (p