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

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Gonadotropins are suppressor of pro-apoptotic signals in male germ cells

tejpareek submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.springerlink.com)

The role of pituitary gonadotropins in the regulation of spermatogenesis has been unequivocally demonstrated, although, the precise mechanism of this regulation is not clearly understood. Previous studies have shown that specific immunoneutralization of LH/testosterone caused apoptotic cell death of meiotic and post-meiotic germ cells while that of FSH resulted in similar death of meiotic cells

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The conserved transcriptome in human and rodent male gametogenesis

addict submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.pnas.org)

"We report a cross-species expression profiling analysis of the human, mouse, and rat male meiotic transcriptional program, using enriched germ cell populations, whole gonads, and high-density oligonucleotide microarrays (GeneChips)."

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