Hannah Lyons

So it was sort of acting like a selective pressure for the sperm and selecting out better quality.

So less were able to get through at zero G, but the ones that could, could do so because they were a better quality sperm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what we saw was that those embryos that we made from these sperm, they had more cells allocated towards the fetal development side of the embryo.

And that's generally a marker that, yeah, these are going to make better embryos and better offspring if you were then to put those embryos back into the animal.

So this is obviously this experimental design was done in a very short timeframe.

So the original sperm measures were done after an hour and then the embryo measures were done after four hours.

So that exposure time is very short comparative to when you think about actual reproduction, the sperm are traveling through the track for 12 to 24 hours.

the human would be exposed for a lot longer time than that.

Pregnancy is obviously a lot longer.

So you can't really extrapolate it out to whether or not we'd be able to reproduce.

Even when we did the experiments for more like 24 hours, we saw any of those positive effects were negated by the negative effects, presumably on the embryo being at zero G. So yeah, so at the moment, it probably doesn't look likely that that would mean necessarily that we would be able to reproduce, but it does mean that

At least the sperm do have motility and they are able to fertilize still at that zero G. And perhaps what we've learned from this study, we can apply here on earth to look at ways to select the best sperm.

So commonly in assistive reproductive technology systems, we use, we select sperm for IVF or for ICSI where we inject the sperm directly into the egg.

And we're constantly looking for new methods to pick out what the best sperm possibly is.

So people have made microfluidic devices and all sorts.

And whilst we might not use this particular device, say in an IVF setting,

If we can find out what the molecular fingerprint of these better, higher quality sperm are, we can potentially develop technology that can select for them.