Some sperm the cells are relentless manipulators that will literally poison your competition in the race to fertilize an egg, new research shows.
In a study published on February 4 in the journal PLOS Genetics, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) in Berlin studied mouse sperm cells under the microscope to better understand the effects of a particular DNA sequence known as t haplotype. The team knew from previous research that sperm carrying this sequence tend to swim straighter (rather than in circles of death) and faster, on average, than competing sperm without it.
Now, they have found that the tactics of these highly effective sperm are somewhat less sporting.
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“Sperm with the haplotype t can deactivate sperm without it,” study co-author Bernhard Herrmann, director of MPIMG, said in a statement. “The trick is that the haplotype t ‘poisons’ all the sperm, but at the same time it produces an antidote, which acts only on the sperm t [those with the t-haplotype] and protects them. “
The result, said Herrmann, is like a marathon “in which all participants are left with poisoned drinking water”, but only some of the runners have access to the antidote.