Putting the squeeze on sperm DNA

In the quest for speed, Olympic swimmers shave themselves or squeeze into high-tech super-suits. In the body, sperm are the only cells that swim and, as speed is crucial to fertility, have developed their own ways to become exceptionally streamlined. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and Grenoble, the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) and the Institut Albert Bonniot, both also in Grenoble, have been studying the secrets of speedy sperm. Their work, published today in Nature, shows how a protein only found in developing sperm cells, Brdt, directs tight re-packaging of sperm DNA...

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