Fig. 5

CLEC5A function is related to malfunctioning spermatozoa following ZIKV infection. a A cytomorphological study of mature spermatozoa harvested from the cauda of the epididymis was conducted using Papanicolaou stain. Aberrant morphology in the head or tail of spermatozoa (red arrows) was observed in ZIKV-infected stat1^−/− mice and stat1^−/−clec5a^−/− mice compared to that in uninfected C57BL/6 mice. The proportions of normal and abnormal sperm were quantified for statistical analysis. b Sperm motility assay. At least three randomly selected fields of view were analyzed for each group (a). c Immunofluorescence staining of sperm allowed the visualization of ZIKV (green, anti-NS1-eGFP), cytoplasm (red, CellTracker), and nuclei (blue, DAPI). ZIKV-positive sperm were counted from more than 150 sperm cells in three random fields of view per mouse and are presented as percentages of all cells. Samples were taken from ZIKV-infected stat1^−/−(n = 12) and stat1^−/−clec5a^−/− mice (n = 8) (7 dpi) and uninfected C57BL/6 mice (n = 3), which served as negative controls. Quantitative data are presented as mean ± SD. *p < 0.05; ***p < 0.001; N.D., not detected. Scale bars: (a) 50 μm; (c) 25 μm