Sperm dance to calcium's tune en route to egg

摘要

From headbanging to pirouettes, sperm cells need the right moves to bag the egg. Identifying how sperm switch from one movement to another could lead to better fertility treatments for men, it now seems. In the journey up the female reproductive tract, sperm cells have to plough through a range of viscous barriers, says Stephen Publicover at the University of Birmingham, UK. To do this they have to adapt their behaviour accordingly. Broadly speaking, sperm are either activated, swimming forwards in a spiral, or hyperactivated, thrashing wildly - used to enter the egg. To find out how sperm switch from one stroke to the other, Publicover and his colleagues studied calcium signalling in human sperm cells. Sperm cells appeared to be activated when calcium enters through ion channels in the tail.