No abstract

Many high-performance stallions have low-quality frozen semen.Thus, strategies to improve the quality of post-thawed semen before artificial insemination are of great interest to increase the fertility of those animals. During the semen freezing process, equine spermatozoa are more prone to oxidative stress because a large portion of the seminal plasma is discarded after centrifugation (Brinsko et al., 2000). This results in an imbalance in seminal plasma antioxidants, reactive oxygen (ROS) and nitrogen species (RNS) produced mainly via sperm metabolism (Amidi et al., 2016). Equine sperm mainly relies on oxidative phosphorylation for the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP;Gibb et al., 2014) that may lead to high oxidative stress than that in the human sperm, which depend on glycolysis as the main energy production pathway (Aitken & Drevet, 2020;Mayorga-Torres et al., 2017). Moreover, nitric oxide (NO) and peroxynitrite anions, which are nitrogen-derived free radical, likely play significant roles in reproduction and fertilization. However, the