Sperm-egg fusion DECODED: Like a key that unlocks a gateway

A sperm and an egg come together like a lock and key, new research carried out by scientists in Austria suggests. Their study carries exciting clues about how fertilisation works, what happens when a sperm and egg come together and it might be the exact same phenomenon across the animal kingdom, from fishes to people.

"We discovered this mechanism that's really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell," co-author Andrea Pauli from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, said.

The study was published Thursday in the journal Cell.

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They analysed zebrafish, mice, and human cells as part of the study which revealed that a lock and key mechanism is at play during fertilisation. Three proteins on the sperm join to form a type of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach.

The study authors further say that it has been this way over millions of years of evolution.

Nobel Prize winning tech helped make revelation

Earlier studies had shown the presence of two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg's membrane. Pauli's lab worked with international collaborators and used Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold to identify the new protein that works to establish the first molecular connection between sperm and egg.

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Notably, the developers of this tool were recently awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Pauli says that earlier it wasn't known how the proteins "worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognise each other."

Scientists still have more to learn about the sperm and the egg as they are yet to decode how the sperm gets inside the egg after attaching to it.

Pauli says learning more about the fertilisation process in detail can help understand infertility better and develop new birth control methods.