By will Dunham
You can forget WASHINGTON (Reuters) - about the birds and the bees. If you really want to learn how are babies made, you need to know about Juno and Izumo.
Fertilization takes place when an egg cell and a sperm cell recognize to get each other and fuse on an embryo. But as they recognise each other, hook remained a mystery.
Researchers said on Wednesday that the two cells combine a protein on the surface of the egg, which interacts with a different protein on the surface of a sperm cell have identified allows.
This protein, or Juno to honor of the ancient Roman goddess of fertility and marriage and its counterpart in the sperm.
a Japanese marriage shrine of Izumo named, indispensable for the reproduction in mammals including humans, 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.
"The identification of this interaction between Juno and Izumo, we now know the identity of the receptor proteins on the surface cum and our mother egg, to the point where we were designed to interact our father 's" 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 try to find out, whether problems with the Juno receptor are to blame.
"It is worth noting that approximately 20 per cent of cases of infertility is a cause of unexplained", said Enrica Bianchi of the Sanger Institute, another of the researchers.
"We are now asking whether Juno in these cases of infertility is unexplained", Baker added.
Wright said that if defects in the Juno receptor are indeed involved in human infertility, a simple, non-invasive genetic screening test could be developed to identify affected women.
"Then the insemination would cause," said Wright, taken from in-vitro fertilization affected women directly to a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection with direct injection of sperm into an egg to let.
Japanese scientists have discovered the sperm Izumo protein in 2005, but the identity of the counterpart to the egg remained difficult. The Sanger Institute researchers made an artificial version of Izumo to try to find an answer, and found that it interacts with Juno to initiate fertilization.
They then developed mice that lacked Juno. The females these mice were barren, because their oocytes with sperm not backup. The Japanese researchers had previously shown that male mice lacking the Izumo-sperm protein also infertile.
In the new study, the researchers determined a rapid loss of Juno protein from the egg surface after fertilization. They said this can be omitted, as blocked a fertilized egg prevents additional sperm are formation of embryos with more than a sperm cell, which would be unviable.
(Message from will Dunham; (Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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