Saturday 4 August 2012

Slower, Longer Sperm Outcompete Faster Rivals, Surprising Finding Shows

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2012) — When it comes to sperm meeting eggs in sexual reproduction, conventional wisdom holds that the fastest swimming sperm are most likely to succeed in their quest to fertilize eggs. That wisdom was turned upside down in a new study of sperm competition in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), which found that slower and/or longer sperm outcompete their faster rivals.

The study, recently published online in Current Biology and forthcoming in print on Sept. 25, was done by a team of scientists led by corresponding author Stefan Lüpold, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. The team made the discovery using fruit flies that were genetically altered so that the heads of their sperm glow fluorescent green or red under the microscope. The fruit flies, developed by biology Professor John Belote, enable researchers to observe sperm in real time inside the female reproductive tract.

"Sperm competition is a fundamental biological process throughout the animal kingdom, yet we know very little about how ejaculate traits determine which males win contests," says Lüpold, a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow working in the laboratory of biology Professor Scott Pitnick. "This is the first study that actually measures sperm quality under competitive conditions inside the female, allowing us to distinguish the traits that are important in each of the reproductive phases."

Continued:
 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120801143728.htm

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