Raman spectroscopy of DNA packaging in human sperm cells
Alina Negina1, Elena Rimskaya1, Alexey Gorevoy1; 1Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia
Abstract
Healthy men typically generate spermatozoa of which roughly one quarter to two fifths display atypical head morphology. An elevated proportion of sperm with such aberrant head forms has been associated with male infertility, and biochemical analyses on pooled sperm samples indicate that abnormally shaped cells may harbor DNA that is inadequately repackaged by protamines during spermatid maturation. In this study, we applied Raman spectroscopy to record spectra from human spermatozoa and investigated how variations in sperm chromatin spectra relate to cellular morphology. We demonstrate that Raman spectra recorded from individual spermatozoa exhibit specific vibrational marker bands that allow evaluation of DNA packaging efficiency at the single-cell level.
Speaker
Alina Negina
Lebedev Physical Institute
Russia
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