NIH-funded research to address rising male infertility

Male infertility is on the rise, with significant declines in sperm quantity and quality occurring across the human population worldwide in the past two decades. Thanks to an eight-year, $8 million, multi-institution grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Cohen and her collaborators will untangle the complex genetic rulebook for making sperm, while also looking for hidden causes of infertility related to spermatogenesis. "The newly funded research builds on decades of cutting-edge reproductive science at Cornell, as well as Dr. Cohen's leadership of the highly successful Center for Reproductive Genomics on campus," said Robert Weiss, associate dean for research and graduate education at CVM. "The new award from the NIH will support several exciting basic and clinical research projects that hold tremendous promise for advancing human reproductive health." Because sperm cells have so much genetic action happening in such a short period of time, they make the perfect test subject to better understand how RNA is regulated in general. Investigating "Junk" RNA. Once RNAs are made in the sperm cell, there's still the matter of how they behave and where they go. Specifically, they'll be looking at a mysterious portion of messenger RNA known as the three-prime untranslated region - a "Tail" at the end of the mRNA strand that was long considered to be "Junk" RNA. Studies have shown that 3'-UTR is suspected to be the mRNA's instruction manual. "If you alter these reader, writer and eraser proteins in the RNA, they can all result in infertility in mice - and are really important for spermatogenesis. In the future, if we knew there were certain RNA modifications that caused infertility in men, we could screen for them."