Spermatozoa sorting techniques for the sex pre-selection: A review

Furtherance of sex pre-selection techniques is extremely beneficial for the farm productivity and economic growth of the country. Several techniques such as flow cytometry, swim-up, percoll gradient centrifugation, lumisort and immunogenic spermatozoa sexing developed so far are reviewed with their principles, advantages, disadvantages and possible ways for developing a highly reliable and efficient technique to achieve success in obtaining offspring of the desired sex. Out of all these techniques available till now, sorting X- and Y- spermatozoa using fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS) is the most successful and commercially available technique, which employs sorting of spermatozoa based on DNA content. Despite its effectiveness, there are disadvantages concerning cost, sperm damage, trained technical person, low conception rate, etc. An alternative approach that might have potential significance could be the identification of sex-specific membrane marker proteins for the immunological method of spermatozoa sorting.