Isolation of spermatogonia cells

As we already mentioned in some previous post we got a new Hungarian-Slovenian project on spermatogonia transplantation. Even if the project officially starts at the beginning of 2016, we were all eager to start with the first step – spermatogonia isolation and cryopreservation.

For that occasion Jelena and Zoran from Dr. Ákos Horváth group came to Slovenia to try to isolate these cells from brown and marble trout. Beside the isolation of spermatogonia we also took some samples of the whole testis and the pituitary gland for gene expression analysis.

We were quite successful with the isolation itself, as we optimized the protocol by the end of the visit, but had some problems with cryopreservation, which we still have to solve. In either case, the overall impression was that we successfully started the project and we all look forward to a great collaboration, with new challenges but also exciting results.

 > Of course we couldn’t miss a walk to lake Bled, just before collecting brown trout from the hatchery (from left: Zoran, Aleš, Simona and Jelena)

 > At the hatchery

>Everyone observing Jelena at work

 >Toni collecting males

 > Lab work...

 > Isolated testis

 > Zoran excited about successful spermatogonia cells separation with percoll