ANCILLARY TESTS OF BULL SEMEN QUALITY

Various seminal quality tests, including sperm morphology, sperm motil ity, cervical mucus penetration, zona pellucida penetration, osmotic s welling, supravital staining, fluorescent staining, and flow cytometri c analyses are described in relation to their ability to identify pote ntial fertility in animals. The new automated semen analyses systems r eviewed in this article tend to provide more reliable information, but may not be cost-effective. The determination of true fertility, which can be assessed only by the number of Live offspring, will continue t o be required no matter how sophisticated the seminal quality methodol ogy becomes.