Study of sperm cell phosphorylating systems using nucleotide photoaffinity probes

The major thrust of the research presented in this thesis was to identify specific nucleotide binding proteins and phosphoproteins of rat caput and cauda sperm. Also, the differences in these proteins between caput and cauda sperm were investigated as well as determination of the membrane sidedness of the proteins and their location in either the head or tail/mid-piece region. In addition, the effects of small molecular weight modifers such as cGMP, cAMP and Ca2+ on the detection of binding proteins and phosphorylated proteins was studied. The technique used to identify and locate nucleotide binding proteins was photoaffinity labeling using the proven 8-azidopurine nucleotide analogs of cAMP, ATP and GTP in radioactive form. The first study presented involved the use of [32P]8-N 3cAMP which showed that both caput and cauda sperm contained both type I and type II regulatory subunits (R/sub I/ and R/sub II/, respectively) of the cAMP dependent kinases and that the great majority of the regulatory subunits were located in the tail/mid-piece section and not in the sperm head. The second phase of this study involved the use of [γ32P]8-azidoadensosine triphosphate ([γ32P]8-N3ATP) and (γ32P)8-azidoguanosine triphosphate ([γ32P]8-N3GTP) to photolable specific ATP and GTP binding proteins and to phosphorylate specific phosphoproteins. Again, this was done on caput versus cauda sperm and the location of the majority of the photolabeled or phosphorylated proteins was shown to be in the tail/mid-piece fraction. In addition, considerable differences were found in both the phosphorylated and photolabeled proteins of caput versus cauda sperm