#spermatocytes

Restoring Male Fertility

You’ve just been given the devastating news that you have cancer and need to undergo treatment. The last thing on your mind as a young man in this situation, probably, is becoming a father, but the fact that cancer treatments can make you infertile is a very real prospect. A possible way to restore fertility in such individuals is with a spermatogonial stem cell transplant, but currently the technology is inefficient as many of the transplanted cells differentiate and don’t maintain their regenerative capacity to support meiosis and the creation of healthy sperm cells. However, by temporarily suppressing the differentiation of donor stem cells, the transplant is able to repopulate the testes with cells that can undergo spermatogenesis (shown in green in this mouse testis cross-section). This could unlock a range of potential applications by making the technology much more efficient and successful to bring hope to cancer patients.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Image from work by Yoshiaki Nakamura and colleagues

Division of Germ Cell Biology, National Institute for Basic Biology, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Okazaki, Japan

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Cell Stem Cell, April 2021

Hot and Bothered

Nematode worms (C. elegans) are able to fertilise themselves, so it might seem odd to probe them for clues to human fertility. Yet both C.elegans and humans need to protect their precious germline cells – sex cells like the early spermatocytes, which mature along the transparent body of a wriggling worm, shown here stained under a fluorescence microscope. The DNA inside the cells (coloured green-blue) has been exposed to a blast of heat, leaving some damaged areas (purple). Researchers found that ‘heat shock’ harms this DNA by causing genes to ‘jump’, while the worm’s early egg cells or oocytes shield themselves from these damaging alterations. As heat may also damage DNA inside human sperm leading to infertility – perhaps studying the different responses in nematode sex cells might suggest treatments to bolster fertility in response to heat stress from lifestyle, illness and even climate change.

Written by John Ankers

Image by Nicole Kurhanewicz

Institute of Molecular Biology, Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Current Biology, October 2020