How Does Sperm Move?
Anton van Leeuwenhoek was the first to describe how sperm moves similarly to eels. But he was wrong.
Image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch textile businessman and a doorman at the town hall. But in his spare time he did a bit of science. Maybe you have heard of him as the inventor of the microscope. Though he wasn’t its inventor he still improved them to such a degree that he managed to discover microorganisms, blood and muscle cells, and even sperm. So he certainly deserves the title “Father of Microbiology”.
Back in the seventeenth century, Leeuwenhoek describe human sperm as “eels with a wavy tail”. And from his point of view, he was certainly right. So, why was he wrong? Because 2D microscopes create this illusion. That is why modern British and Mexican scientists used 3D microscopy to get to the truth.
Combining a camera capable of getting up to 55,000 thousand pictures per second and a microscopic table with a piezoelectric device to move the samples up and down allowed them to observe the sperm as it flows in 3D. This allowed them to find out that sperm does not swim as an eel but more like when young otters play.
The results of the study were recently published by the Journal Science Advances. To simplify, the tail of the sperm only rotates in a single direction. If you know anything about mechanics, you are probably confused now as this should mean the sperm cannot swim forward but only in a circle. But sperm found a clever way how to deal with this handicap. Essentially, they create symmetry from asymmetry. Again, to very simplify this – The head of the sperm moves depending how how the tail of the sperm moves. It is actually sort of similar to how the Earth itself moves around the Sun.
The scientists hope that their 3D sperm imaging technology will find its way to real-world clinics. This could be a godsend as we know that about half of the cases of infertility are caused by issues on the sides of men. And getting better images of sperm would certainly help fix them easier.
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