Fertilization, a key event in reproduction, requires that sperm find and penetrate an egg in order to contribute the father's chromosomes to the new offspring. In many animals sperm are aided by substances given off by the egg that act as attractants. These chemicals, referred to as sperm chemoattractants, can be steroids, peptides or proteins. The research proposed concerns the sperm chemoattractant "Allurin", a protein isolated from frogs that has been proven to guide sperm to eggs and is predicted to carry out this function in many animal types including amphibians, birds and mammals. The specific goals of this project are 1) to determine the molecular regulatory mechanisms by which sperm respond to allurin, 2) to determine what classes of animals utilize allurin-like proteins to guide sperm, 3) to deduce the molecular shape of the protein and determine what parts of the molecule are critical for sperm response and 4) to better understand the behavior of sperm in response to attractive factors produced by eggs. The research proposed will strengthen our basic knowledge in the reproductive sciences essential to increasing the efficiency of animal production in agriculture, to development of better in vitro fertilization techniques in humans, and to control of human and animal populations that threaten to overwhelm the planet's carrying capacity. In addition this research will provide training for both undergraduate and graduate students essential to their careers in industry, government or academia. Finally, new research tools will be created including new clones and antibodies for allurin-related proteins, new nucleotide and amino acid sequence information for allurin-related proteins that will be added to worldwide databases such as GenBank, and new assay techniques and software for characterizing sperm chemoattraction.
