Can you turn teeth into sperm?

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 3 weeks (www.newscientist.com)

COULD sacrificing a tooth enable some infertile men to father children? That's the goal of researchers in Brazil, who suggest that stem cells from human teeth can be coaxed into becoming sperm by being injected into the testes of mice.

Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute in São Paulo and her colleagues injected stem cells from the dental pulp of human teeth into the testes of live mice. The cells seemed to migrate to the tubules where sperm usually mature and differentiate into cells resembling human sperm

2 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: spermatogenesis human reproduction men's health infertility adult stem cells stem cell research stem cells gametes sperm teeth human teeth

Tension gets chromosomes oriented

sea-maid submitted, created time 7 months 2 days (www.jcb.org)

Using grasshopper cells in meiosis, Bruce Nicklas and Carol Koch show that attachments of mono-oriented chromosomes can be stabilized using a glass needle to pull on one of the chromosomes.

Thus tension between two kinetochores, generated only in the bi-oriented state, might discriminate between correct and incorrect attachments.

2 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: gametes kinetochores meiosis chromosomes

Air pollution causes sperm mutations