Immunoelectron Microscopic Studies on Outer Dense Fibres

Abstract

For a major part of the length of the mammalian sperm tail, the axoneme is surrounded by nine outer dense fibres, thus creating the so-called 9+9+2 cross-sectional pattern. The aim of this study was to evaluate the staining patterns of the Gi-8F8 monoclonal antibody against the 30 kDa outer dense fibre protein (Villegas et al., 1995) in different mammalian spermatozoa using preembedding methods. Previous investigations demonstrated the specificity and cross-reactivity of this monoclonal antibody between human, porcine and bovine spermatozoa at both the light microscopic and ultrastructural level (Schalles et al., 1995). Additionally, parts of the primary structure of the 30kDa ODF protein showed high homologies with the main ODF protein in rat spermatozoa (Staff et al., 1995; Morales et al., 1995). In order to localise the specific binding sites of the Gi-8F8 moAb at the ultrastructural level, without disturbance of fixation or embedding media, preembedding techniques were applied.