Assessment of the stallion sperm acrosome in two different extenders: Spermac stain in comparison to PNA/PSA/PI triple-staining.

Since the stallion acrosome is very small compared to other species and cannot be properly assessed without additional staining, several labelling techniques were developed to facilitate its assessment. The aim of this study was to compare the Spermac stain (Minitüb GmbH) and a PNA/PSA/PI triple-staining detected by flow cytometry with regard to method agreement for detecting non-intact acrosomes within two different extenders. For this purpose, eighteen stallion ejaculates were split in half and diluted with the semen extenders EquiPlus or Gent (Minitüb GmbH) to a final concentration of 50×10 6 sperm/mL, respectively. Subsequently 126 semen samples were stained with both methods between 4 h and 240 h (mean: 63.8±48.9 h) after semen collection. Calculated Intraclass correlation coefficients revealed excellent correlations between both methods for EquiPlus (r=0.77, P<0.001) and fair correlations for Gent (r=0.49, P<0.001). Interestingly, flow cytometry detected more non-intact acrosomes in EquiPlus than in Gent (P<0.001), whereas the Spermac stain showed no differences (P=0.902) between extenders. The poorer method agreement in Gent could be caused by egg yolk artefacts which made interpretation difficult, so flow cytometry might be preferred. The differences in detected non-intact acrosomes between extenders highlighted the importance of establishing adapted laboratory protocols for different extender types in order to generate comparable results.