Zona pellucida antibodies in human sera

The Mammalian Egg Coat

“…These findings are in agreement with the reports by Dakhno et al (1980) and Nayudu et al (1982) who also showed the higher incidence of positive PHAR results in sera of infertile patients than in that of control subjects. Tests by PHAR on a total of 318 samples from the WHO Reference Bank for Reproductive Immunology (Mori et al 1985a) revealed a 3.1% positivity (3/96) among infertile women compared to 0.9% (21222) among control subjects (Table 4).…”

“…Using absorption with formalin-fixed por cine or human AB erythrocytes (Mori et al 1978(Mori et al , 1979, we found the serum sam pies of eight out of 52 infertile patients to be positive (15.4%) whereas the serurr samples of only one of the 52 control subjects was positive (1.9%). Nayudu et al (1982) reported that by a thorough absorption procedure the positive reaction in the IIF assay by the sera of infertile patients could be removed. Shivers made a comparative study using the IIF assay OJ anti-zona antibodies in the sera of clinically defined categories of patients regis tered at the World Health Organization (WHO) Reference Bank for Reproductiv1 Immunology.…”

Infertility and Immunocontraception based on zona pellucida

“…Their results showed that the prevalence of anti-ZP antibodies in infertile women was a nonspecific reaction. Many studies supporting these contrary results were also reported [15][16][17][18][19][20]. Furthermore, it was found that most or all positive reactions disappeared after absorption with pig erythrocytes [15,16].…”

Sperm–zona pellucida interaction and immunological infertility

“…However, there has been serious controversy over the actual existence of such antibodies because antizona activities have been detected in the sera of both infertile and fertile women and men, and these activities disappeared after thorough adsorption of the sera with porcine red blood cells 28,29 . In many previous reports showing the presence of antizona activities, indirect immunofluorescence (IF) method using porcine ZP as the target instead of human ZP was used as a screening test, because the ZP from these two sources show antigenic cross‐reactivity and the availability of human ZP is limited.…”

“…However, there has been serious controversy over the actual existence of such antibodies because antizona activities have been detected in the sera of both infertile and fertile women and men, and these activities disappeared after thorough adsorption of the sera with porcine red blood cells. 28,29 In many previous reports showing the presence of antizona activities, indirect immunofluorescence (IF) method using porcine ZP as the target instead of human ZP was used as a screening test, because the ZP from these two sources show antigenic cross-reactivity and the availability of human ZP is limited. However, IF test using intact porcine ZP was proven to have some methodological problems on account of binding of non-specific immunoglobulin and hetero-hemagglutinin against porcine red blood cells 16,17 False positive reactions and disappearance after absorption of the sera with porcine erythrocytes have made the actual existence of such antibodies confusing.…”