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Breaking egg barrier: A sperm story
Sperm doesn’t shift into high gear in mammals just to show off, new research shows. It originally needed that extra speed to break the egg barrier.
Later on, evolution enabled sperm to use its souped-up swimming to navigate tricky reproductive pathways even before reaching the egg.
That is the finding of a new study led by Jean-Ju Chung, an assistant professor of cellular and molecular physiology at the Yale School of Medicine. The study appears in the journal Cells.
In her previous work, Chung has looked at the molecular structures and mobility of sperm in placental mammals such as mice and humans. Placental mammals are distinguished by the presence of a placenta that sustains the fetus during development.