Ihshan Akthar (supervisor: professor Akio Miyamoto, Department of Life and Food Science), a second-year student in the Doctoral Program in Animal and Food Hygiene of the Graduate School of Animal Husbandry, won the Outstanding Presentation Award at the 111th annual meeting of the Society for Reproduction and Development held at the Department of Textile Science and Technology, Shinshu University (Ueda, Nagano), from Wednesday, September 12 to Sunday, September 16. Six award finalists selected in advance gave oral presentations at the meeting. The award winner was then selected from among these finalists.
Akthar’s study was titled, “Sperm enters bovine uterine glands ex-vivo and initiates a pro-inflammatory response.” Dairy cows are impregnated by artificial insemination using frozen sperm and begin to produce large quantities of milk right after giving birth to a calf. Mr. Akthar and other members developed a multifaceted explant model using video of fresh uterine cells for pro-inflammatory response induced by sperm motility to investigate an acute uterine inflammatory response induced by sperm in vivo. Observations showed that sperm enter the uterine glands, many of them invade the uterus, neutrophils appear in the uterine glands and they initiate sperm clearance.
This study revealed that the sperm-uterine inflammatory process in vivo matched with the ex-vivo process. The results of this study could be important scientific information for developing artificial insemination technology in the future. This achievement is the result of a joint research effort between Cornell University and Hiroshima University.
