While people usually put a lot of effort into finding a partner, recent research suggests that our bodies are choosy in their own ways. Chemical signals that are released by human eggs can attract sperm, and new work has shown that eggs also use these molecules to ‘select’ the sperm they want. The findings, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that eggs also don’t always pick the same sperm; eggs from different women can opt for sperm from different men.
“Human eggs release chemicals called chemoattractants that attract sperm to unfertilized eggs. We wanted to know if eggs use these chemical signals to pick which sperm they attract,” explained study author John Fitzpatrick, an Associate Professor at Stockholm University.
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