Featured Image
Why is it important?
As the chromosomes of sperm are tightly compacted within the sperm head, the female reproductive tract must be "reading" relevant genetic information from the sperm surface and then acting on it. This means that the female reproductive tract treats a spermatozoon like a traveller arriving at an airport immigration desk and showing his or her passport. This view of the sperm surface as a source of information is quite unusual.
Perspectives
Apart from the purely scientific satisfaction gained from novel finding like this, several practical applications may stem from it. For example, if we could read the information ourselves, we would be able to separate male and female-chromosome bearing sperm before insemination. This would definitely interest the agricultural sector (e.g. cattle, sheep and pigs), where for various reasons they generally want to breed females. A practical application in humans fraught with ethical problems but may be helpful in terms of preventing sex-linked genetic diseases. It is also likely that if indeed information about the sex chromosomes can be accessed via the sperm surface, then information about other chromosomes might be readable. At present this is not a possibility because we first need to understand how the information is presented and read.
Professor William Vincent Holt
University of Sheffield
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The battle of the sexes starts in the oviduct: modulation of oviductal transcriptome by X and Y-bearing spermatozoa, BMC Genomics, January 2014, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-15-293.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
