Why could sea urchin be used by a research team that is interested in developing a...

Why could sea urchin be used by a research team that is interested in developing a drug that could disrupt the binding of mature sperm to the egg cell membrane to prevent conception?

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Expert Solution

In the sea urchin, all regions of the egg plasma membrane are skilful of fusing with sperm. In numerous other species, certain regions of the membrane are specialized for sperm recognition and fusion . Fusion is an active process, often intervened by specific “fusogenic” proteins. It looks that bindin plays a second role as a fusogenic protein. The sea urchin bindin will cause phospholipid vesicles to fuse together and that, like viral fusogenic proteins, bindin holds a long stretch of hydrophobic amino acids near its amino terminus. This region is capable to fuse phospholipid vesicles .

The sea urchin sperm find their way unerringly to the egg cells of their own species.

It almost seems to happen by magic. But the magic here is chemotaxis.

Chemotaxis defined as movement of a motile cell or organism, or part of one, in a direction corresponding to a gradient of increasing or decreasing concentration of a particular substance.

gladiator answered 1 year ago

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