Are fluorescence-labeled fucolectins superior markers for flow cytometric quantitation of the human sperm acrosome reaction?
Fucosylated glycans are expressed on AR human sperm. Fluorescence-labeled fucolectins markedly improved the signal:noise ratio in the detection of acrosomal loss of human sperm when compared with FITC-PSA or FITC-PNA. Fluorescence-labeled fucolectins can be used as specific markers for flow cytometric quantitation of unfixed AR sperm in suspension.
The 1-3% detection rates of three recently published series have not been realized at our center where we studied a group using criteria making patients more likely to have hypercortisolism. Our results do not support the validity of screening patients without clinical features of Cushing's syndrome in the diabetes clinic.