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| Image courtesy of University of York |
"Researchers have developed a mathematical formula based on the rhythmic movement of a sperm's head and tail, which significantly reduces the complexities of understanding and predicting how sperm make the difficult journey towards fertilizing an egg.
Researchers at the Universities of York, Birmingham, Oxford and Kyoto University, Japan, found that the sperm's tail creates a characteristic rhythm that pushes the sperm forward, but also pulls the head backwards and sideways in a coordinated fashion.
Successful fertility relies on how a sperm moves through fluid, but capturing details of this movement is a complicated issue.
The team aim to use these new findings to understand how larger groups of sperm behave and interact, a task that would be impossible using modern observational techniques. The work could provide new insights into treating male infertility.
Dr Hermes Gadêlha, from the University of York's Department of Mathematics, said: "In order to observe, at the microscale, how a sperm achieves forward propulsion through fluid, sophisticated microscopic high precision techniques are currently employed.
"Measurements of the beat of the sperm's tail are fed into a computer model, which then helps to understand the fluid flow patterns that result from this movement.
"Numerical simulations are used to identify the flow around the sperm, but as the structures of the fluid are so complex, the data is particularly challenging to understand and use. Around 55 million spermatozoa are found in a given sample, so it is understandably very difficult to model how they move simultaneously..."
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