ArticleNature communications2017
Human sperm steer with second harmonics of the flagellar beat.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Liquid Crystal Polymers as Intrinsically Magnetic and Programmable Soft Materials for Microrobotics.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Precise 3D Tracking of Highly Non-Planar Eukaryotic Flagellar Beating Patterns Using Digital Holographic Microscopy.Small methods · 2026Article
- Sperm hyperactivation drives a circling-and-wandering swimming behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- 3D+t human sperm flagellum centerline dataset.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Intermediate light adaptation induces oscillatory phototaxis switching and pattern formation inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- 3D+t Multifocal Imaging Dataset of Human Sperm.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Label-free metabolic fingerprinting of motile mammalian spermatozoa with subcellular resolution.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Swimming by Spinning: Spinning-Top Type Rotations Regularize Sperm Swimming Into Persistently Progressive Paths in 3D.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Magnetic control of soft microrobots near step-out frequency: Characterization and analysis.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- Fallopian tube rheology regulates epithelial cell differentiation and function to enhance cilia formation and coordination.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Fluid flow reconstruction around a free-swimming sperm in 3D.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Identification of a novel MYO1D variant associated with laterality defects, congenital heart diseases, and sperm defects in humans.Frontiers of medicine · 2024Article
- Human fertilization in vivo and in vitro requires the CatSper channel to initiate sperm hyperactivation.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2024Article
- On the role of calcium diffusion and its rapid buffering in intraflagellar signaling.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2023Article
- Synthesis and Functional Characterization of Novel RU1968-Derived CatSper Inhibitors with Reduced Stereochemical Complexity.ACS pharmacology & translational science · 2023Article
- Flagellum-driven cargoes: Influence of cargo size and the flagellum-cargo attachment geometry.PloS one · 2023Article
- A novel Human Conception Optimizer for solving optimization problems.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Motility Assessment of Ram Spermatozoa.Biology · 2022Review
- cAMP and the Fibrous Sheath Protein CABYR (CaInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Semen parameters are seriously affected in acephalic spermatozoa syndrome.Basic and clinical andrology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sperm are propelled by bending waves traveling along their flagellum. For steering in gradients of sensory cues, sperm adjust the flagellar waveform. Symmetric and asymmetric waveforms result in straight and curved swimming paths, respectively. Two mechanisms causing spatially asymmetric waveforms have been proposed: an average flagellar curvature and buckling. We image flagella of human sperm tethered with the head to a surface. The waveform is characterized by a fundamental beat frequency and its second harmonic. The superposition of harmonics breaks the beat symmetry temporally rather than spatially. As a result, sperm rotate around the tethering point. The rotation velocity is determined by the second-harmonic amplitude and phase. Stimulation with the female sex hormone progesterone enhances the second-harmonic contribution and, thereby, modulates sperm rotation. Higher beat frequency components exist in other flagellated cells; therefore, this steering mechanism might be widespread and could inspire the design of synthetic microswimmers.
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