Drs Christopher Barratt and Ian Brewis, from the University of Birmingham and Birmingham Women's Hospital, are establishing and characterising a human in vitro cell culture for the study of infertility caused by sperm dysfunction. Approximately one in six couples in the UK are infertile, and the most common cause is abnormal or insufficient numbers of spermatozoa. Many animals are used in infertility research. It is generally believed that more than half of the cells from which sperm cells are derived, die before maturity. The cell death occurs most probably by a process known as apoptosis, or programmed cell death, where the cell breaks down into fragments.
Apoptosis is a protective mechanism to remove excessive or genetically damaged cells.
The mechanisms of apoptosis in sperm cells are largely unknown, and the limited knowledge available is based almost exclusively on rodent models, which is not applicable to humans due to several differences in development of sperm cells between species. From these biopsies segments of seminiferous tubules are isolated and cultured to set up the in vitro model.