January 31, 2001

1 min read

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New Test for Male Infertility

By Kate Wong

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Couples unable to conceive may soon be better able to pinpoint the cause of their problem. According to a report in the journal Human Reproduction, a team of American and Japanese scientists has developed a test for male infertility that surpasses conventional semen analysis.

The new method, called sperm-ubiquitin tag immunoassay (SUTI), searches sperm cells for a small protein known as ubiquitin, an indicator of damage or defect. Using ubiquitin antibodies to screen sperm from 17 infertility patients and two fertile donors, the researchers confirmed previous diagnoses in some cases and revealed reasons for infertility that had been inexplicable in others. "Ubiquitin appears to be a universal marker of semen abnormalities, recognizing a wide range of sperm defects and also contaminants in semen," says team member Peter Sutovsky of Oregon Health Sciences University. "In around one fifth of all couples, current methods cannot identify a cause," he adds. "SUTI will be able to provide an answer in at least a portion of these cases."

What is more, SUTI may even play an active role in treatment, team member Gerald Schatten notes. "Since we now know a specific protein that is associated with defective sperm and we have antibodies against it, there is a chance that we could develop a technique for depleting most of the truly defective sperm from semen samples for [in vitro fertilization] or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)¿the process by which an egg is fertilized by injecting a single sperm."

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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