MOLECULES ASSISTING TO FERTILIZATION

American zoologist Frank Rattray Lillie said more than 100 years ago.
The combination of the egg and the sperm cell is not a process in which the sperm infiltrates the egg only through mechanical processes. In this process, an unusually close and special biochemical reaction plays the leading role.

Benjamin Kaupp, a cell biologist at the Center for European Studies in Germany, tried to explore how this close and special reaction took place on sea urchins. Kaupp and his team realized that the only thing needed to attract the attention of sea urchin sperm in previous years was only one chemoattractant molecule out of billions of water molecules;
Using the information contained in the chemical concentration, the sperm cells make calculations to determine the direction in which they will float. For a certain period of time, they can count the molecules, combine the information they have obtained, and change their direction depending on the situation.

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Previously, intracellular pH changes were known to be an important factor for sperm signals, but the process was not clear enough. Finally, it turns out that a chemoattractant molecule binds to the receptor in the whip of the sperm, and this initiates the signaling process that helps calcium ions penetrate the sperm cells.

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When this stimulation occurs, the calcium reactions change the whip's strokes, directing the tail of the sperm like a ship's rudder, and ultimately the egg is fertilized. As Kaupp and his team found in their recent studies, it is a molecule called SpSLC9C1 that performs calcium exchange.

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