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from the sperm?-wang?-we-couldn't-make-this-up! dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
While some of our body's cells divide in a matter of hours, the process of making sperm, meiosis, alone takes about 14 days from start to finish. And fully six of those days are spent in the stage known as the pachytene, when pairs of chromosomes from an individual's mother and father align and connect.
"This stage is really important, because the pair needs to be aligned for the exchange of genetic material between those two chromosomes," says P. Jeremy Wang, a biologist in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine. "If anything goes wrong at this stage, it can cause a defect in meiosis and problems in the resulting sperm, leading to infertility, pregnancy loss, or birth defects."
In a new paper in Science Advances, Wang and colleagues have identified an enzyme that plays a crucial role in maintaining this chromosomal pairing during the pachytene stage of meiosis. Without this protein, named SKP1, meiosis cannot proceed to metaphase, the next major developmental stage involved in generating sperm cells.
The finding may help overcome hurdles that have stood in the way of treating certain forms of male infertility, in which a man makes no sperm but in whom sperm's precursor cells, spermatogonia, can be found.
"Reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization have made a huge difference for infertile patients, but the male needs to have at least some sperm," says Wang. "If the male has no sperm, then the only option is to use donor sperm. But if you can find these spermatogonia, the pre-meiotic germ cells, they could be induced to go through meiosis and make sperm. So SKP1 could be part of the solution to ensuring meiosis continues."
Wang is also hopeful that his finding could aid in basic research on sperm development that his and many other labs pursue. "Right now we use animals to do our research; we don't have a cell culture system to produce sperm," he says. "Manipulating SKP1 and the pathway in which it acts could allow us to set up an in vitro system to produce sperm artificially, which would be a boon for our studies."
[...] "Now that we know SKP1 is required, we're looking for the proteins it interacts with upstream and downstream so we can study this pathway," says Wang.
Journal Reference:
Yongjuan Guan, N. Adrian Leu, Jun Ma, Lukáš Chmátal, Gordon Ruthel, Jordana C. Bloom, Michael A. Lampson, John C. Schimenti, Mengcheng Luo, P. Jeremy Wang. SKP1 drives the prophase I to metaphase I transition during male meiosis. Science Advances, 2020; 6 (13): eaaz2129 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz2129
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 28 2020, @02:47PM (10 children)
That's so obviously wrong, and you know it. If an infertile westerner undergoes a fertility treatment and is then able to have three children (that they otherwise wouldn't), then the world population quite obviously just went up by three. Rinse and repeat. Those three extra kids will eat foods over their lifetime that require large areas of agricultural land and large amounts of energy to produce. They'll create tons of plastic waste, much of which will end up as microplastics damaging ecosystems. Their existence will likely cause a large amount of CO2 to be produced which will accelerate climate change. And if they each have children of their own, all these problems will continue to multiply.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 28 2020, @02:50PM (2 children)
I hasten to qualify this by saying that once the children's parents die, if the children survive, the population has effectively increased by one.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:06AM (1 child)
by acid andy ...@02:47PM
by acid andy ...@02:50PM
Does 3 minutes qualify as haste? ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:24AM
According to his wife, yes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 28 2020, @04:20PM (6 children)
Fortunately, it's not infertility that's holding back the teeming Western hordes.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 28 2020, @04:45PM (2 children)
I think even if each one of their descendants has three children, that would still create over ten billion people after 56 generations.
Each generation of their family would be 3/2 times the size of the one that preceded it.
(3/2)56 = 7,262,907,400.88
7,262,907,400.88 x 2 = 14,525,814,801.76
Did I get that right?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 28 2020, @04:59PM
"IF". So are each one of their fertile descendants having three kids apiece? Is infertility what's holding the developed world back?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 28 2020, @09:44PM
OK, I totally suck at math. A family can't have 0.76 children. It's 21 generations for a single couple to produce a generation of more than 10 billion children.
Just 321 = 10,460,353,203
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @05:25PM (2 children)
...to have ten billion children...
It makes me cringe to think how sore that poor fellow would be. Ouch.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:49PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:14PM
That's one big park. I suppose you could fit more in if they arrange themselves into a human pyramid.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?