Name: 健康が精子に与える影響 (How Health Affects Sperm)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:53:29.000Z
Duration: 4 min 20 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Sperm cells are the smallest cells produced by the human body, at only 50 micrometers long.

But a single sperm cell contains a complete copy of all the data found on 23 chromosomes,

which can be hundreds of megabytes of information.

Even your fancy new microSD card can’t compete with that kind of storage density.

And thanks to a study published this week in the journal Cell Metabolism, we now know

that sperm carries not just genetic information, but epigenetic information as well.

Your DNA contains most of the instructions for making you, organized into genes, and

all those genes together make up your genome.

But even though each cell gets a complete copy of that genome, it only needs to use

certain parts -- and it figures out which parts based on your epigenetic information.

It needs the help, because your DNA is an incredibly complex molecule -- and it’s

If you stretched out a single molecule of your DNA? It would be two meters long!

So, how do you squeeze a two meter long molecule inside the nucleus of a cell? You wrap the

DNA tightly around a long filament of protein called histone. Coiling the molecule into

But it also introduces a new problem: your DNA is wrapped SO tightly around the histone

that your cell can’t access most of your genetic information anymore.

So, in addition to histone and DNA, you also have epigenetic markers.

“Epigenetic” literally means “above your genes.” And those epigenetic markers

They tell the cell where to coil the DNA tighter, and where to let it unspool. Unspool the DNA,

and the cell can read the genes in that location. Tighten up the coil, and the genes there won’t

It’s part of the reason that, say, a neuron becomes a neuron, and not a muscle cell -- those

The neuron reads the parts of your DNA that tell it how to be a neuron, and not the parts

that would tell it how to be a muscle cell.

That’s how powerful epigenetic markers can be -- and they can change based on how you

live your life. Your weight, diet, stress levels, and even your moods can alter those markers.

We also know that they’re inherited, but for a long time, geneticists thought that

sperm cells were too small to contain both the genome AND the epigenetic information of the donor.

And while some studies in the past have suggested this might not be the case for mice, there

hasn’t been much research into the human side of things.

Sperm cells were believed to be inert carriers of DNA, so scientists just...never really

Until now! In this study, a group of researchers from

the University of Copenhagen were specifically looking at the differences in the sperm cells

And what they discovered was that those sperm cells not only contained epigenetic markers,

but they contained DIFFERENT epigenetic markers depending on whether the donor was lean or

Specifically, there were differences at the gene regions associated with appetite control.

The team compared sperm cells from 13 lean men and 10 obese men, and then tracked 6 men

who were going through weight-loss surgery, to see how the weight loss affected their sperm.

On average, five thousand changes to sperm DNA were found between samples from before

Well, the differences in those sperm cells were found not in the structure of the DNA

or in the histones -- they were in a different, related kind of molecule, called small RNA.

And turns out that small RNA can also act as an epigenetic marker, by telling the cell

For decades, scientists believed that RNA molecules only functioned as messenger molecules,

carrying information to different parts of your cells.

Then, in 1998, geneticists discovered that some RNA molecules play a huge role in silencing

your genes. They can prevent genes from being expressed -- making them an epigenetic marker.

They detect certain groups of instructions in your DNA, and then just clip onto them,

And in the men in the study, they clipped onto different parts of the DNA, depending

Women who want to have a child hear a lot of health recommendations, both before and

after they get pregnant: things like maintain a healthy weight, don’t smoke, stay away

from alcohol and drugs -- because that could potentially affect the health of the child,

And at least part of the reason is that these things can change epigenetic markers, which

But according to the lead author on the study, these results tell us that prospective fathers

might want to take care of themselves, too.

Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space News, and thanks especially to our patrons

on Patreon who help make this show possible. If you want to help us keep making episodes

like this, just go to patreon.com/scishow. And don’t forget to go to youtube.com/scishowspace

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健康が精子に与える影響 (How Health Affects Sperm)

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incredibly

stretch

metabolism