Wednesday 23 October 2013

Jab the sperm met the egg

Ok, all of us know that we were formed by the combination of an egg and a sperm. But did you know that when the egg and sperm joined to become a zygote, initially all the work was done by the genes from the egg?

It is only after the first few divisions that both the gene sets from father and mother kick into synergised action.

And then on, it is a zygotic genome.

Till then, the cells are pleuripotent meaning each cell can become any organ. But from this time the cells start differentiating. to a large extent become unique and start responding to the neighboring cells and the surrounding environment...

There is a very interesting paper on this phenomenon in the recent Science journal, if you are interested... 

Combined with the fact that your energy production mechanism, the mitochondria, come from the mother, the continous early divisions of the fertilised egg reminds one of the efforts of the mother in creating you.

Science 341, 1005 (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1242527

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