How spermatozoa come to be confined to surfaces

Abstract

In most detailed studies, sea urchin sperm movement has been analyzed mainly from observations of spermatozoa swimming at the interface between two media: water/air or water/glass. When spermatozoa are placed on a microscope slide, they rapidly appear to swim near those interfaces. The aim of this article is to determine how they become confined to the vicinity of surfaces. High-speed observations of moving spermatozoa reveal blurred portions in the flagellum images that propagate from base to tip, suggesting that flagellar waves contain an out-of-plane component. The model we have developed depicts how this tri-dimensional component tends to keep spermatozoa close to interfaces and, as a consequence, increases the time of contact between the egg surface and spermatozoa.