Resumen
- In the present study, the integrity of the boar sperm plasmalemma decreased during the 72 h of semen storage at 17 °C, although significant differences between incubation times were only detected when the techniques assessing the integrity of the tail membrane were used (i.e., HOST and HOST/E). Lima et al. (2015) found that the integrity of the sperm head membrane when evaluated by using the E/N technique decreases significantly between 0 and 72 h of boar semen storage, probably because the first assessment was that of the raw semen, whereas in the present study all the analyses were performed on diluted semen. In agreement with previous studies with boar ( Vazquez et al., 1997;Gaczarzewicz et al., 2010) and bull ( Brito et al., 2003) semen using the HOST technique indicated there was a lesser percentage of the intact sperm plasmalemma than with vital staining, providing further support that the use of the HOST technique allows for distinguishing a sperm subpopulation with a non-functional tail within the population of head-intact sperm ( Vazquez et al., 1997)