No Heads

There’s not much to sperm cells. They consist of a head, which contains the genetic payload, and a tail, which accelerates the cell toward the awaiting egg. Nevertheless, they can, for a number of reasons, go wrong. The fruit fly sperms pictured on the left, for example, have a tendency to lose their heads (orange). They lack a protein called centrobin that's well known for organising cellular scaffolding during cell division, but that has more recently been found to organise protein assembly in sperm too. The mutant protein disrupts proper tail formation and weakens the head-to-tail link such that it is easily broken. Importantly, centrobin is highly conserved across the animal kingdom, including humans. And, delicate sperm prone to decapitation is a known cause of sterility in men. Continuing such research in flies, then, may one day lead to treatments that can tackle male infertility head-on.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by S. Llamazares / Gonzalez Lab, IRB Barcelona
• Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Journal of Cell Biology, April 2018