How sperm get into the zona
Monday, June 16, 2014 - 17:20
in Biology & Nature
Sperm (blue) latch onto a control egg (left) but can't bind to an egg lacking the glycoprotein ZP2 (right). Before it can fertilize an egg, a sperm has to bind to and bore through an outer egg layer known as the zona pellucida. Despite decades of research, some of the biological mechanisms behind this process remain unclear. A study in The Journal of Cell Biology now identifies the protein in the zona pellucida that sperm latch onto.