Sex-Sorted Semen Part I
Transcript of Select Sires' Reproductive Moment Program
on DairyLine Radio Which Aired March16, 2006
With Ray Nebel,
Senior Reproduction and Herd Management Specialist, Select Sires Inc.
Ray, this week you have an updated look at sex-sorted semen as we have discussed in the past with Select Sires, and they are partnering with Sexing Technologies.
That’s correct, Bill. Sexing Technologies is located in Navasota, Texas, and just in the last month they have relocated four of the sex sorting machines up to Plain City at one of our facilities.
What are those machines called?
They are really flow cytometers. The semen flows through the machine at a single cell per droplet and that’s the way the DNA is stained and identified with a lazar that amplifies difference of the stains so we can put a charge on the cell and separate them based on the electrical charge based on the DNA content.
Is this technology continuing to be developed?
Through research with Sexing Technologies primarily, partnering with us, we are developing new sheath extenders that allow semen to go through; when looking at the machines the machines look like totally different machines from when we started a few years ago. It’s an evolving technology that I think we are looking at and I hope we can improve conception rates as we go along.
You have had a chance recently to visit a few farms, where were you and were they using this?
Last week we had a workshop for the Select Reproductive Solutions Specialists for World Wide Sires, the All West people from Washington to California, and then the Cache Valley people in Utah, Idaho and Nebraska. We were located in Utah and after meeting last Tuesday I got to visit six dairies in the central Utah area.
At those six dairies what did you find?
Well, it was interesting because I didn’t pick the dairies; they were ones they wanted me to go visit and all six of them were using sex-sorted semen. The common denominator was all six were using it on heifers, and that’s were it has been recommended to date. We know we’ll get the best return for our investment in the heifers and we’ll have a higher conception rate. What was interesting at last weeks visit was that three of the six farms were actually using it in the lactating herd with better results that we would have predicted, and actually one farm used it on an embryo flushes, which was a total amazement to me.
Why was this so amazing?
I think the amazing thing was in a normal straw of semen we put between 15-20 million sperm. Because the sexing sorting is a very tedious and slow process we can only put about two million sperm per straw. When we do an embryo transfer we are super-ovulating the cow and hoping for a whole clutch of eggs to be released so we have to fertilize multiple eggs so the two million sperm per straw is a very low number to get high fertilization rate. So what this farm is doing is putting two straws in when the cow is first identified in heat and then two more straws 12 hours later. Now that semen goes for about $40 per straw, so we are talking about $160 for semen. They were getting back on average two excellent to good embryos, other embryos with it, but we are talking about both of those embryos being the heifer variety, so at today’s market it still makes a good return.
We’ll continue to discuss more about this next week with Ray Nebel, the Select Sires’ Reproductive Solutions specialist.
