The Instituto Bernabeu and the Chair of Reproductive Medicine from the UA present a study on how nicotine affects sperm at the Histology Congress

The Instituto Bernabeu and the Chair of Reproductive Medicine of Alicante University (UA) have presented a research project related to smoking and fertility at the 19^th Congress of the Spanish Society of Histology and Tissue Engineering, the 4^th Ibero-American Congress of Histology and the 7^th International Congress of Histology and Tissue Engineering held in Santiago de Compostela.

The title of the joint project that was presented at the Conference is “α7-Nicotinic receptor expression is at higher densities at the equatorial band in human sperm cells”. It is part of a line of research carried out by the Instituto Bernabeu and the Chair of Alicante University on the nervous system receptors and sperm. The researchers have discovered that there is a receptor in the head of the sperm called nicotinic, which in male smokers can alter the capacity to fertilize the ovum. To discover this researchers have used high-resolution techniques that help detect these receptors accurately.