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Scientists Find Protein That Lets Egg And Sperm Hook Up
- You can forget about the birds and the bees. If you really want to learn how babies are made, you need to know about Juno and Izumo.
Fertilization takes place when an egg cell and a sperm cell recognize one another and fuse to form an embryo. But how they recognize each other in order to hook up had remained a mystery.
Researchers said on Wednesday they have identified a protein on the egg cell’s surface that interacts with another protein on the surface of a sperm cell, allowing the two cells to join.
This protein, dubbed Juno in honor of the ancient Roman goddess of fertility and marriage, and its counterpart in sperm,
named Izumo after a Japanese marriage shrine, are essential for reproduction in mammals including people, they said.
This new understanding of the role of these two proteins could help improve the treatment of infertility and guide the development of new contraceptives, the researchers said.
“By identifying this interaction between Juno and Izumo, we now know the identity of the receptor proteins found on the surface of our father’s sperm and our mother’s egg that must interact at the moment at which we were conceived,” said Gavin Wright of the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute in Britain, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature.
The researchers are now screening infertile women to try to determine whether problems with the Juno receptor are to blame.
“It is remarkable that about 20 percent of infertility cases have an unexplained cause,” said Enrica Bianchi of the Sanger Institute, another of the researchers.
“We are now asking whether Juno is involved in these cases of unexplained infertility,” Bianchi added.
Wright said that if defects in the Juno receptor are in fact implicated in human infertility, a simple, non-invasive genetic screening test could be developed to identify affected women.
“This then would allow us to guide the fertility treatment,” Wright said, letting affected women proceed directly to a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection involving direct injection of sperm into an egg obtained from in vitro fertilization.
Japanese researchers identified the sperm cell’s Izumo protein in 2005, but the identity of its counterpart on the egg cell had remained elusive. The Sanger Institute researchers made an artificial version of Izumo to try to find an answer, and found that it interacted with Juno to initiate fertilization.
They then developed mice that lacked Juno. The females of these mice were infertile because their egg cells did not fuse with sperm. The Japanese researchers earlier had shown that male mice lacking the Izumo sperm protein were also infertile.
In the new study, the researchers detected a quick loss of the Juno protein from the egg’s surface after fertilization. They said this may account for how a fertilized egg blocks out additional sperm cells, preventing formation of embryos with more than one sperm cell that would not be viable.
Posted by
ifyabukaya
April 22, 2014 at 1:34 pm
Africans are not interessted in such news.. bring on news about kaponya’s undressing their own women in public, children killing their own grannies for suspected witchcraft, false prophet tb. joshua stealing from blind followers..
#guru
April 27, 2014 at 11:18 am
thomas acqinas
April 22, 2014 at 2:48 pm
but indimwe asilu bati you should say you are not interested speak for yourself
(•ิ_•ิ)?
April 22, 2014 at 3:00 pm
what’s your beef arsehole??
FK
April 22, 2014 at 5:38 pm
Ifyabukaya if u are not interestd keep quiet let us who like to be updated read such news,mwatemwafye news ya nsele/insults.are u telling us indirectly hw far u va gone wth school.
Shilingi Mia
April 22, 2014 at 6:32 pm
Yaba! Some people can be sacarstic on this forum! You start wondering whether they have been brought up in HOMES or STREETS. However, even some of us who grew up on the streets know how tame our language even in extreme provocations unless otherwise- you lose nothing in arguing politely.
Bemba woman
April 22, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Ala abanthu ubwikalo nabu bashupa. Babafye aba fulilwa limo…no money in their pockets.
leon
April 23, 2014 at 2:26 am
no coment so far all attacking one fellow with own opinion where is the anger(hunger) from. Its like we do not understand the topic above the might be right and many would rather pretent,ask questions like in which meat fruit etc is the protein in abundance so on
http://www.jodeyat.net
April 30, 2014 at 9:23 pm
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added”
checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get three
emails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove
people from that service? Bless you!