Semen quality assessment of improved Wallachian sheep breed: a preliminary study.

Viability and sperm motion parameters are the most common indicators of sperm quality. Semen samples (n = 15) of Improved Wallachian (IW) sheep males with no evidence of genital tract infections were used to determine the quality of semen. We applied computer-assisted semen analysis (CASA) system to determine sperm motility parameters. Flow cytometry (FCM) was used to evaluate occurrence of live or apoptotic sperm. Our results showed quite good motility parameters: 81.12 ± 2.72 % of total motility (TM) and 77.91 ± 3.15 % of progressive motility (PM). Moreover, the ratio of viable sperm was 70.77 ± 4.81 % and of apoptotic sperm ˗ 9.37 ± 3.37 %. These results suggest that semen can be collected from IW sheep and used for artificial insemination or cryopreservation for gene bank of animal genetic resources. However, evaluation of higher sample numbers using different methods are needed to analyse the semen quality in details.