From Globe and Mail:
While fertilization is the crucial first step to all human life, it has not been easy for scientists to determine precisely what happens when egg and sperm meet. In addition to the technical challenges, experiments that require human fertilization immediately raise ethical issues.
To sidestep these dilemmas, researchers in both groups found ways to separately generate two proteins that are known to be crucial for fertilization and studied their interaction.
The teams were then able to deduce the three-dimensional structures of the proteins and show precisely how they fit together, atom to atom. Their complementary findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
…
One intriguing detail is that the Izumo1 protein, which is long and narrow but bent like a boomerang, becomes more extended once it makes contact with Juno.
“It snaps up and locks in place, almost like a Swiss Army knife,” said Dr. Lee. More.
Hey, Darwinclass, it only looks designed. Don’t start getting ideas.
See also: Memo to Myers and Marcotte: Embryologists agree that an individual human life begins at conception (Vincent Torley)
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