ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM,
DZIKA_MROWKA
The causes of infertility are many and yet doctors sometimes can’t explain why couples have trouble conceiving. Scientists have uncovered yet another way our bodies can trip up fertilization. In a study published today (August 19) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers found that sperm function better in cervical mucus from women with less similar sequences for the genes that encode the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, a group of cell-surface proteins that the immune system uses to differentiate self from non-self. With more-similar genotypes, sperm were less likely to survive exposure to cervical mucus.
“Quite a lot of these type of effects have been shown in other animals . . . but obviously there’s a different importance to understanding this in humans,” says David Richardson, a biologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK who did not participate in the study.
In ...
