Hannah Lyons

Lots of things, really.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

So as you go up the female reproductive tract, you get slight increases in the temperature and that helps them to know which direction to be going in.

The egg is constantly releasing factors that attract the sperm to them, again, helping them know where to swim.

Same with the flow of the sperm.

mucus and the fluid within the reproductive tract they know to swim against it so wherever the fluid is moving a bit faster the swim know okay that's the way i need to swim and i'll swim through that so yeah they're very um there's all these wonderful evolutionary mechanisms to get the sperm where they need to go

Yeah.

So we had a basic channel in this set of experiments.

In the future, we want to even further recapitulate the female reproductive tract.

But yeah, so they had to swim from A to B down this channel.

And what we found was that some sperm could swim from A to B, but there was a lot less sperm that were able to navigate in that zero G environment.

Oh, about 50% less.

Okay.

So a large reduction.

But what we did find was those sperm that could navigate were perfectly fine.

Otherwise, they had normal motility and all the other parameters were completely normal to what we saw in the normal gravity.

It was just that there was less of them.

and interestingly we thought what could be the purpose for this and we actually found that in the human sperm those sperm that got to the end of the channel could better bind a surrogate measure of binding to an egg um which is called like a hba assay and then moving on to the mouse and the pig we wanted to test this again and we actually found that the sperm that could navigate the channel could fertilize and that the embryos that they made

were of higher quality, which was really surprising for us.