Bart M. Gadella

1 Introduction Fifteen percent of couples at reproductive age suffer from infertility worldwide (Dyer, 2009). Male factors solely contribute 20%–30% to infertility, which could be the cause in approximately 50% of couples (Patel et al., 2018; Agarwal et al., 2021a). The evaluation of male infertility in the biomedical field is currently based on the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria using semen (Barratt et al., 2017).

Introduction After leaving the testis, mammalian sperm undergo two post-testicular maturation processes, one in the male epididymis, known as epididymal maturation (Gervasi and Visconti, 2017), and the second in the female genital tract, known as capacitation (Austin, 1951; Chang, 1951). Contrary to epididymal maturation, capacitation can be mimicked in vitro in a defined medium.

Oladele A. Oluwayiose1, Emily Houle1, Brian W. Whitcomb2, Alexander Suvorov3, Tayyab Rahil4, Cynthia K. Sites4, Stephen A. Krawetz1,5, Pablo E. Visconti6 and J.