Exoskeleton for paralyzed sperm

DailyTechInfo based on ASC materials: ‘Spermbots’ could help women trying to conceiveIn the traditional process of reproduction of humans and other animals, nature has laid the idea of achieving a positive result due to the number of attempts.

In most cases, out of 200-500 million sperm cells, a maximum of a hundred successfully get to the egg, and only a few of them are able to penetrate into the egg and fulfill their purpose. This process is influenced by such a large number of extraneous factors that it is absolutely amazing how people manage to continue their kind during the entire lifetime of human existence as a species.

One of the problems leading to infertility, i.e. to the impossibility of normal fertilization, is the low mobility of spermatozoa in some people, despite the fact that otherwise these spermatozoa are completely healthy and functional. There are methods to solve this problem, such as artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization, but such methods are extremely expensive and do not always give the desired result.

To solve the problem of infertility, scientists from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences (Institute for Integrative Nanosciences), Dresden, Germany, have developed a futuristic technology that allows you to turn an individual sperm into a controlled cyborg robot, which can be "guided" along the necessary path and help it get inside the egg.

The basis of the technology developed by German researchers is a kind of exoskeleton, in which a separate sperm is clothed. This exoskeleton is made of a polymer coated with a layer of metal that wraps like a spring around the tail of a sperm. The applied external magnetic field of a given shape and polarity causes all this to rotate around its axis and move forward. And simultaneous control and monitoring of the movements of the Spermbot micro robot can be performed using a magnetic resonance imaging unit.

In the video below, the process carried out in a Petri dish is demonstrated in all details. The sperm, dressed in an exoskeleton, reaches the egg with "dizzying" speed, and the microdrive even helps it to get inside, making the fertilization process as easy as possible.

Note that the technology developed by German scientists is not yet ready for practical use. But all this is just the first step in the right direction, which, we hope in the future, will help some people find their bit of happiness in life.

Similar (only exactly the opposite :) the work of the same group of scientists was published at the end of 2013 – VM.

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17.01.2015