NurseWeek

Protein key in fertility for female mice

By Michelle Paolucci
October 28, 2000


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Dallas. Infertile couples of the future may have a cardiology lab to thank for uncovering the key to understanding why some embryos don’t make it through the initial phases of development.

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center were studying the protein HSF-1 for its role in protecting cardiac cells under stress. When they bred mice without the HSF-1 protein, they discovered that not only were the cardiac cells left unprotected, but that the female mice couldn’t reproduce.

"This is identifying a particular protein that could be important in the mom that is absolutely crucial for embryo survival," said Ivor Benjamin, Ph.D., lead researcher at the UT Southwestern cardiology lab. "During the course of studying mice without HSF-1, we had a lot of surprises. Among them was the discovery that the female mice were sterile," he said.

Benjamin explained that his lab already had reported that the protein was necessary for fertility and for proper formation of the placenta in mice. But in a paper recently published in Nature, the authors pinpointed the lack of HSF-1 protein as the reason why some of the mice could not reproduce.

"Information about the presence of HSF-1 protein in eggs and embryos was available in the literature [before our discovery]. The surprise is to see a factor expressed nearly everywhere having a major effect only in a limited number of cell types such as embryos or placental cells," said UT Southwestern researcher Elisabeth Christians, Ph.D.