The Secret of Life: 3 Proteins

By Shlomo Maital  

      Have you ever wondered:  How in the world do those little sperms – cells with big heads and wriggly tails – manage to get into the ovum, the female cell produced by the ovaries?  Cells have thick walls.  They have to – otherwise, really bad stuff could get int.  COVID, for instance, gets into cells, because it has a huge long spike, a spear, and it pokes its way into the cell, and ‘persuades’ the cells in our body to produce copies of itself.  But the little sperm?  They have no spike.

        But what DO they have?   Writing in the New York Times, October 17, Elizabeth Preston explains clearly and movingly a new finding, that solves the mystery.[1]

         A Google company, DeepMind, developed software, AlphaFold, whose principal developers shared the Nobel Prize this year for chemistry  – a rare event in which the Nobel for science is given to a group of researchers from a business, rather than to scholars from a university or lab.  Using AlphaFold, scientists at a research institute in Vienna have discovered the nature and structure of the three key proteins in the head of the sperm, that act as ‘keys’ to combine with a protein in the ovum cell wall and ‘unlock’ it, to enter, fertilize it – and generate a zygote, a fertilized ovum ready to reproduce. Proteins are driven by genes, and they control our lives. They have very complex ‘folded’ structures that are really hard to decipher — until now.

          And – here’s the clincher.  Those 3 proteins – they are shared by a huge variety of living things – humans, yes,  and ….zebrafish.  Those lovely striped black and white fish.  Same 3 proteins on their testes (sex organs).  

           Does this make you think, that we humans are not really at the head of the food chain, but instead, PART of an amazing ecosystem with which we living things share many things, including those key (double meaning) proteins?   Does this make you feel a bit humble, as it does me?   

             Picture that obstreperous sperm, outracing a million rivals, reaching the ovum, knocking politely on the door – no answer.  Knocks again.  No answer.  Whips out the keys (3 proteins), turns the key in the lock, wriggles inside – and creates a new life, or the start of it.  And then?  Those two helixes of interlocked DNA,  they separate, one stays, the other moves on to the divided cell… and the process continues. 

                  There is incredible beauty in the creation of life – and those 3 proteins have unlocked only a very tiny part of it. 

[1] Elizabeth Preston. “Sperm can’t unlock an egg without the ancient molecular key”.  NYT  Oct. 17.