Comments on: Brothers Fighting Together: scientists found that sperm cells have evolved sophisticated social behaviours that aid them in the race to fertilize eggs http://en.dogeno.us/2010/01/brothers-fighting-together-scientists-found-that-sperm-cells-have-evolved-sophisticated-social-behaviours-that-aid-them-in-the-race-to-fertilize-eggs/ thoughts about life and science, blogged by Liang Cai | cail.cn Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:51:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: cail.cn http://en.dogeno.us/2010/01/brothers-fighting-together-scientists-found-that-sperm-cells-have-evolved-sophisticated-social-behaviours-that-aid-them-in-the-race-to-fertilize-eggs/#comment-17831 cail.cn Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:24:11 +0000 http://en.dogeno.us/?p=6322#comment-17831 http://f1000biology.com/article/id/1797996/evaluation Hunter Fraser Stanford University, United States of America In this work, Fisher and Hoekstra show that sperm from mice can cooperate with one another in a highly selective fashion, by forming fast-swimming aggregates specifically with other sperm from the same male. This fascinating behavior is a vivid example of the effects of competition for fertilization. By fluorescently tagging sperm from multiple males with different colors and then mixing these together, preferential aggregation of sperm from the same male was observed. This was seen only in a promiscuous mouse species, and not in a monogamous species, suggesting that competition between sperm from different males may be driving this behavior. Intriguingly, sperm could even differentiate between self vs sperm from a brother (to an equal extent as they could discriminate sperm from an unrelated male), suggesting that genetic similarity between sperm is unlikely to be responsible for this discrimination ability. The mechanism underlying this behavior is not known, but will surely be an exciting subject for future work. http://f1000biology.com/article/id/1797996/evaluation

Hunter Fraser
Stanford University, United States of America

In this work, Fisher and Hoekstra show that sperm from mice can cooperate with one another in a highly selective fashion, by forming fast-swimming aggregates specifically with other sperm from the same male. This fascinating behavior is a vivid example of the effects of competition for fertilization.

By fluorescently tagging sperm from multiple males with different colors and then mixing these together, preferential aggregation of sperm from the same male was observed. This was seen only in a promiscuous mouse species, and not in a monogamous species, suggesting that competition between sperm from different males may be driving this behavior. Intriguingly, sperm could even differentiate between self vs sperm from a brother (to an equal extent as they could discriminate sperm from an unrelated male), suggesting that genetic similarity between sperm is unlikely to be responsible for this discrimination ability. The mechanism underlying this behavior is not known, but will surely be an exciting subject for future work.

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