Background: Infertility affects one-fifth to one-sixth of couples reproductive age. Gamete donation is one option for managing infertility, but it relatively unknown in the developing world. Objectives: To assess Nigerian undergraduate students' knowledge, attitude and willingness participate gamete artificial insemination. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 160 st...

Dear Editor, Today some infertile couples who want to have children have request for getting gametes which is a confidential process. According to law, no person must know the identity of the gamete providers (1). Confidentiality of information relating to gamete and embryo donation can cause serious ethical problems. In some countries, forming the Bank of gametes and embryos is intended as a w...

Frequencies of multilocus male gametes in seeds collected from clones in several blocks of a white spruce seed orchard were analyzed as part of a 2-yr study of mating system variation in this species. Observed frequencies of male gamete types departed significantly from those expected assuming equal male fertilities among clones. Male gamete frequencies in seed crops were significantly heteroge...

Gamete membrane interaction is critical to initiate the development of a new organism. The signaling pathways governing this event, however, are poorly understood. In this report, we provide the first evidence that protein kinase C activity in mouse eggs plays a crucial role in the regulation of this process. Stimulating PKC activity in mouse eggs by phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) drasti...

In random mating autopolyploid populations which have not reached equilibrium, two alleles may be interdependent as a result of the phenomenon of gametic recombination, i.e. the maintenance through successive gamete generations of an association of two alleles from the same gamete in a source reference generation. Any two alleles are dependent by this relationship if they derive by descent from...

Mathematical and experimental simulations predict that external fertilization is unsuccessful in habitats characterized by high water motion. A key assumption of such predictions is that gametes are released in hydrodynamic regimes that quickly dilute gametes. We used fucoid seaweeds to examine whether marine organisms in intertidal and subtidal habitats might achieve high levels of fertilizati...

Developmental failure caused by excess sperm (polyspermy) is thought to be an important mechanism driving the evolution of gamete-recognition proteins, reproductive isolation, and speciation in marine organisms. However, these theories assume that there is heritable variation in the susceptibility to polyspermy and that this variation is related to the overall affinity between sperm and eggs. T...

The cell-cell interactions that occur between sperm and egg involve not only the binding but also the fusion of the gamete plasma membranes. Numerous studies, carried out decades ago and more recently, have implicated several different molecules on both the sperm and egg as being involved in gamete membrane interactions. The sperm proteins that have received the most attention recently have hom...

The plasma membranes of gametes are specialized for fusion, yet, once fusion occurs, in many organisms the new zygote becomes incapable of further membrane fusion reactions. The molecular mechanisms that underlie this loss of fusion capacity (block to polygamy) remain unknown. During fertilization in the green alga Chlamydomonas, the plus gamete-specific membrane protein FUS1 is required for ad...

Vertically transmitted endosymbiotic bacteria, such as Wolbachia, Cardinium and Rickettsia, modify host reproduction in several ways to facilitate their own spread. One such modification results in parthenogenesis induction, where males, which are unable to transmit the bacteria, are not produced. In Hymenoptera, the mechanism of diploidization due to Wolbachia infection, known as gamete duplic...