ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2019
Flagellar ultrastructure suppresses buckling instabilities and enables mammalian sperm navigation in high-viscosity media.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Swimming by Spinning: Spinning-Top Type Rotations Regularize Sperm Swimming Into Persistently Progressive Paths in 3D.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- The ancient and helical architecture of Elasmobranchii's spermatozoa enables progressive motility in viscous environments.PloS one · 2025Article
- Transformation of sperm structure in Octopus vulgaris: From spermatogenesis to spermatophoric release.PloS one · 2025Article
- In-cell structural insight into the stability of sperm microtubule doublet.Cell discovery · 2023Article
- Human sperm rotate with a conserved direction during free swimming in four dimensions.Journal of cell science · 2023Article
- The reaction-diffusion basis of animated patterns in eukaryotic flagella.Nature communications · 2023Article
- TTC6-Mediated Stabilization of the Flagellum Annulus Ensures the Rapid and Directed Motion of Sperm.Cells · 2023Article
- Article
- The three-dimensional coarse-graining formulation of interacting elastohydrodynamic filaments and multi-body microhydrodynamics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Curvature in the reproductive tract alters sperm-surface interactions.Nature communications · 2021Article
- The multi-scale architecture of mammalian sperm flagella and implications for ciliary motility.The EMBO journal · 2021Article
- Modelling Motility: The Mathematics of Spermatozoa.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Collective dynamics of sperm cells.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Flagellar kinematics reveals the role of environment in shaping sperm motility.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- RETRACTED: Human sperm uses asymmetric and anisotropic flagellar controls to regulate swimming symmetry and cell steering.Science advances · 2020Article
- The steering gaits of sperm.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Eukaryotic flagellar swimming is driven by a slender motile unit, the axoneme, which possesses an internal structure that is essentially conserved in a tremendous diversity of sperm. Mammalian sperm, however, which are internal fertilizers, also exhibit distinctive accessory structures that further dress the axoneme and alter its mechanical response. This raises the following two fundamental questions. What is the functional significance of these structures? How do they affect the flagellar waveform and ultimately cell swimming? Hence we build on previous work to develop a mathematical mechanical model of a virtual human sperm to examine the impact of mammalian sperm accessory structures on flagellar dynamics and motility. Our findings demonstrate that the accessory structures reinforce the flagellum, preventing waveform compression and symmetry-breaking buckling instabilities when the viscosity of the surrounding medium is increased. This is in agreement with previous observations of internal and external fertilizers, such as human and sea urchin spermatozoa. In turn, possession of accessory structures entails that the progressive motion during a flagellar beat cycle can be enhanced as viscosity is increased within physiological bounds. Hence the flagella of internal fertilizers, complete with accessory structures, are predicted to be advantageous in viscous physiological media compared with watery media for the fundamental role of delivering a genetic payload to the egg.
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