Sea urchin sperm: Appearance, collection and measurement of sperm motility - the ideal CASA solution! Sea urchins belong to the phylum Echinodermata meaning “spiny skinned”. There are five classes of Echinodermata and three of these are indicated below in Fig. 1 (A to C): The sea stars, the sea urchins and the [...]
Microptic organizes a new free webinar on October 15th: The use of Computer Aided Sperm Analysis (CASA) in Research. What is the essential equipment for Research? What is better: raw semen or washed sperm? How should quantitative data be used? What are the most important analyses in Research environment? Prof Gerhard van [...]
How to improve your domestic stock through intelligent solutions! The importance and size of the global domestic animal market is enormous and only the beef market translates to USD 332.9 billion in 2020 with a revenue forecast of about USD 383.5 billion by 2027. The beef market is dominant in USA and [...]
A major breakthrough: Fully automated Computer Aided Sperm Motility Analysis of African bee sperm! We alluded in an earlier blog to the importance of bees as keystone species globally and provided some background on the reproduction of the African bee and our research on bee sperm. Sperm motility in all animals including [...]
Is infertility a disease or a condition or a symptom? Is infertility a disease or a condition or a symptom? This aspect is much debated and very diverse opinions exist on this topic. But let us first review some formal considerations: The World Health Organization defines infertility to be “a disease of [...]
The African rhinoceros’ crisis: What can reproductive biologists do? Fig. 1: African white rhinoceros shortly after darting (horns have been cut so that poachers may be less interested). There are two species of African rhinoceros, the black rhinoceros, Diceros bicornis, and the white rhinoceros, Ceratotherium simum (Fig. 1). South Africa [...]
Prof Gerhard van der Horst (PhD, PhD), Microptic Senior Consultant based in South Africa, went, in October, on a three weeks trip to Spain, The UK, The Netherlands and Poland. First stop: Barcelona For two days, Prof van der Horst stayed at Microptic’ s head office to deal with some important matters [...]
First comprehensive CASA study of Free ranging African elephant sperm in the wild: What does it take? It is seldom realized what it really takes to perform such a formidable research task in the total wilderness. It is not as if there are ten elephants behind bars waiting for semen collection in [...]
Frogs are both sentinel and keystone species and globally threatened: The need to study their sperm biology! Fig. 1: Amazon tree frog during amplexus. (https://live.staticflickr.com/2042/2432835781_af64b46f2f_b.jpg) Everyone knows what a frog is but where do these fascinating animals fit in the Animal Kingdom? They are amphibians (can live on land - [...]
Five PhD students of the Comparative Spermatology Group in Cape Town all use the SCA CASA system with great effect! Cape Town must have among the most active SCA CASA users in the world in a radius of 25 km. Approximately 30 scientists, students and embryologists from the University of the Western [...]
