The age old male view that women are too picky has been taken to a whole new level after research found the female reproductive system may be rejecting sperm it doesn’t find good enough to create a pregnancy.
University of Adelaide Professor Sarah Robertson, who is leading the research, says tests discovered that females have an in-built quality control system, that assesses if the male partner is quality enough to invest her reproductive energy in.
“Part of this whole process is it’s a way of the female body evaluating whether the time is right and whether this particular partner is the right one to conceive a pregnancy with.
“Some women have higher thresholds to responding to this signalling pathway. It might be that with one partner they’re having more trouble than they might with another partner.
“What we understand is that there is a partner-specific component to this. Some combinations of men and women might not be compatible and it’s possible that the immune systems of some women aren’t responding correctly to their partner’s triggering molecules.
In the past, blame has generally been put with the woman if a couple is struggling to conceive and the man has healthy sperm.
But Professor Robertson says her findings show there may be another element to it and with further research there may be tests and treatments later down the track.
The research has primarily been on mice and pigs, but Professor Robertson says there is some indication that it will have the same or similar effect on human females.
“We’ve discovered that there are signalling molecules in the seminal fluid, so that after coitus when that fluid travels from the male to the female reproductive tissues it activates gene expression changes and also changes in the female immune system that increase the likelihood of a pregnancy occurring,” she said.
“At the moment we’ve done lots of work on mice and pigs and we’ve done a little bit of work with human cells and we’ve found if we put seminal fluid on cells in vitro that we get the same kind of changes in human cells.
Professor Robertson says this discovery could be extremely important from an evolutionary perspective, because it means the female body has the ability to decide when the time is right to fall pregnant.
The University of Adelaide research team is looking for female volunteers from 18-40 who have had a tubal ligation, but are in a stable, sexually active relationship.
A woman’s body may be unconsciously selective about sperm, allowing some men’s to progress to pregnancy but killing off the chances of less suitable matches, an Australian researcher said Wednesday.
University of Adelaide professor Sarah Robertson said her research suggested that sperm contains “signalling molecules” that activate immunity changes in a woman so her body accepts it.
But some apparently healthy sperm failed to activate these changes, leading to the suggestion that the female system can be “choosy” about its biological mate, she said.
“It’s rather like a two-way dance,” Robertson said.
“The male provides information that increases the chances of conception and progression to pregnancy, but the female body has a quality control system which needs convincing that his sperm is compatible.
“That’s where the dance can go wrong with some couples – if the male signals are not strong enough, or if the female system is too ‘choosy’.”
Robertson said sperm was more likely to fail if the woman had not previously been exposed to that man’s semen for at least three months.
“We used to think that if a couple couldn’t get pregnant, and the man’s semen test was normal, the problem lay with the woman. But it appears this is not always the case,” Robertson said.
The researchers plan to continue their work, which they hope will lead to improved treatments for infertility and miscarriages. – AFP
New York, Jun 23 (THAINDIAN NEWS) BeautifulPeople.com has launched a controversial virtual sperm bank. According to Sky News, they have launched the egg and sperm bank for people who want beautiful children.
BeautifulPeople.com has always opened its doors and membership to people who are beautiful. However they have been deluged with demands for the sperm and eggs of the pretty people, so they had no option but to give in to popular demand and create a virtual egg and sperm bank. However they are facing a lot of ridicule and criticism from a number of quarters for this step.
The founder of the website Robert Hintze said that, “Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good looking children into the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”
The owners of the website also added that they think that every parent would want to have a pretty child, if they had the choice, hence they implemented the idea. However the idea is not without its critics. Dr. David King who belongs to the watchdog group Human Genetics Alert says that this idea is “dangerous for our society.”
AFP – Hormone replacement therapy and lifestyle choices do not boost the risk of breast cancer associated with a dozen common genetic mutations, according to a study published Wednesday.
Factors such as hormone treatment, alcohol consumption, obesity and giving birth to a first child later in life have all been linked to a higher risk of breast cancer.
A number of common genetic variations also correlate with the disease, albeit weakly.
Earlier research suggested that combining the two types of risk factors could amplify the overall danger, but results were inconclusive.
To help tease apart genetic and non-genetic influences, scientists led by Ruth Travis at the University of Oxford examined the medical histories of some 17,350 women, 7,160 of whom had developed breast cancer.
All of the participants provided blood samples for genetic testing and information on lifestyle habits. Most of the women were post-menopausal.
The researchers looked for 12 variants in the women’s DNA known to boost the danger of cancer.
They also measured 10 environmental risk factors: age at puberty, number of births, age at first birth, breastfeeding, menopausal status, age at menopause, use of hormone therapy, body fat, height and alcohol intake.
Surprisingly, none of the 120 possible match-ups between a single genetic variant and a behavioural or body-type risk factor showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk.
“There was no convincing evidence for gene-environment interaction,” the researchers concluded.
The study did not cover data on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which have a far stronger association to breast cancer than the other genetic variants examined but are much rarer.
“Genes account for only a small proportion of breast cancers for most women and for most women the main risk remains the lifestyle factors,” said Oxford’s Jane Green, a co-author of the study.
ISLAMABAD: A rare genetic disorder may be responsible for causing strokes in young people, though the condition’s progress can be slowed using enzyme replacement treatment, says a study.
The disorder known as Fabry disease is characterised by attacks of burning pain in the hands and feet, dark nodular skin lesions and progressive renal insufficiency.
It is caused by a missing or faulty enzyme needed by the body to process oils, waxes and fatty acids, reports the online edition of BBC News.
These lipids build up to harmful levels in the eyes, kidneys, nervous system, and cardiovascular system. People with the disease can die prematurely because of renal, cardiac or cerebrovascular complications.
The researchers at University of Rostock, Germany, led by Arndt Rolfs, carried out genetic screening of over 700 adults suffering from unexplained strokes to find out whether they had Fabry disease.
They found that four percent of the studied people, aged 18-55 years who had a stroke, also had Fabry disease. The strokes occurred about a decade earlier in people with the condition, they said.
The researchers found that nearly five percent of the male stroke patients and just over two percent of the female patients had genes linked to Fabry disease.
According to the scientists, this could mean that one in 100 of all young people suffering from strokes may have Fabry disease.
This study also found that the average age for a man with Fabry disease to have a stroke was 38, while for women, it was 40.
For men and women who did not have Fabry disease, the average age at which they had a stroke was 48.