Infertility is a widespread health issue affecting both male and female reproductive organs. Fertility, crucial for conception and the development of healthy children, depends on normal eggs and sperm produced through meiotic cell division. Understanding the regulating mechanisms of these processes is critical, to unravel the mystery of infertility and chromosome abnormalities. PRDM9 plays an important role in regulating meiotic recombination but also influences hybrid sterility in wild mice. New research findings from the Meiotic Recombination and Genome Instability Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, in collaboration with the Group of Professor Jiří Forejt, at the Institute of Molecular Mouse Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, show that hybrid sterility is oligogenetically controlled by PRDM9 even, in wild mice, and therefore outside the laboratory model.
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