First evidence of prothymosin alpha localization in the acrosome of mammalian male gametes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prothymosin α (PTMA) is a highly acidic intrinsically unstructured protein. Its expression in male gonads is evolutionary conserved; in rat testis it is specifically localized in the cytoplasm of post-meiotic germ cells, in association with the developing acrosome system. In the present paper we investigated on PTMA localization inside the head of mammalian spermatozoa (SPZ). We chose a confocal approach to ascertain whether PTMA is expressed in the acrosome or in the perinuclear theca, two regions that are tightly linked and partially overlapped in the mature haploid cells. The obtained results showed that PTMA is specifically localized in the acrosome of rat epididymal SPZ; the same experimental approach evidenced, for the first time, PTMA presence in human ejaculated SPZ. A Western blot analysis on protein extracts from human sperm head fractions confirmed the confocal data and demonstrated that the peptide is specifically associated with the inner acrosomal membrane fraction. Finally, when the acrosome reaction was induced in vitro by progesterone treatment on both rat and human sperm, PTMA signal was retained in the apical region of reacted SPZ. In conclusion, this study confirms the conservation of PTMA distribution in vertebrate male gametes and strongly supports a role for this polypeptide in their physiology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".