reproductive system
• female homozygotes fail to produce any litters during 3 months of continuous mating with fertile wild-type males
• however, mating behavior is normal and female homozygotes respond to hormone treatment by ovulating morphologically normal eggs at close to wild-type numbers
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• mutant eggs recovered at E0.5 after superovulation and natural mating are not fertilized and show more sperm within their perivitelline space relative to wild-type eggs
• zona-free mutant eggs cannot be fertilized with wild-type sperm in IVF assays, as determined by the absence of fused sperm and formed pronuclei
• in vitro, acrosome-reacted (GFP-negative) normal sperm identified using Tg(Acr-EGFP)1Osb reporter mice bind less efficiently to zona-free mutant eggs than wild-type control eggs
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