Received December 27, 2010
Accepted February 08, 2011

Objective: Acrosomal integrity is a feature necessary to the correct interaction of the spermatozoon to the oocyte. The assessment of functional integrity of the acrosome is a useful tool for evaluation of male fertility before assisted reproduction treatments. We aimed to validate a perivitelinic binding test(PBT) for human sperm. Methods: Perivitelinic membranes were washed in PBS for yolk removal and squares of 1cm2 were obtained for the incubation of 1mL of Hepes diluted sperm (105sptz/mL) for 2 hours at 37oC. Membranes were washed in PBS for the removal of unbound sperm and they were mounted onto glass slides for count of motile sperm bound(MSB) to the membrane. Acrosome integrity was also assessed in spear smears stained with fast green/Bengal rose for computation of Pearson’s correlation coefficient to MSB. Validation of PBT comprised linear regression of percent of MSB in fresh sperm samples diluted with dead sperm samples (semen plunged into N2L and thawed five times) at the dilution rate of 0:1; 1:4; 1:1; 3:4; 1:0. Pearson’s correlation coefficient between MSB and intact acrosome of fresh samples was calculated. Significance was attained at 0.05. Results: Percent of MSB was correlated with acrosome integrity (r=0.65;p=0.04). Furthermore, MSB was also correlated to the dilution rate(r=0.927;p<0.001) and they featured a significant linear relationship (%MSB=0.09+0.77330 dilution rate; p-value <0.001). Conclusions: Motile sperm binding to egg yolk membrane is an easy and feasible test for the assessment of functional integrity of acrosome. This is a low cost tool for evaluation of semen before IUI and IVF.