The Specificity of Mammalian Spermatozoa, with Especial Reference to Electrophoresis as a Means of Serological Differentiation

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Abstract
The literature on spermatotoxins repeatedly raises the question of the species specificity of mammalian spermatozoa (1–8); however, some authors conclude or imply that spermatozoa are, and some that they are not species specific. The reason for this discrepancy lies in part perhaps in the difficulty of obtaining quantitative estimates of the potencies of antisperm sera by the methods ordinarily used; in part perhaps the trouble has been that too few sperm species have been used, in experiments only incidental to some other purpose.1 Landsteiner and van der Scheer (10) have recently reported the tissue specificity of bull spermatozoa, which they could distinguish serologically from all somatic tissues studied. Do mammalian spermatozoa, then, like lens protein, possess tissue but not species specificity, or do they, as Dunbar has shown for plant pollens and fish spermatozoa (11) possess both tissue and species specificity? The first object of the present report is to answer the question of species specificity.

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