Sterility (physiology)
Sterility is the
.Sterility is the inability to produce a biological child, while infertility is the inability to conceive after a certain period.[1] Sterility is rarely discussed in clinical literature and is often used synonymously with infertility. Infertility affects about 12-15% of couples globally.[2] Still, the prevalence of sterility remains unknown. Sterility can be divided into three subtypes natural, clinical, and hardship.[1] Natural sterility is the couple's physiological inability to conceive a child naturally. Clinical sterility is natural sterility for which treatment of the patient will not result in conception. Hardship sterility is the inability to take advantage of available treatments due to extraneous factors such as economic, psychological, or physical factors. Clinical sterility is a subtype of natural sterility, and Hardship sterility is a subtype of Clinical sterility.
Mechanisms of sterility
Sterility can also be caused by selective breeding, where a selected trait is closely linked to genes involved in sex determination or fertility. For example, goats breed to be polled (hornless). This results in a high number of intersex individuals among the offspring, which are typically sterile.[3]
Sterility can also be caused by chromosomal differences within an individual. These individuals tend to be known as genetic mosaics. Loss of part of a chromosome can also cause sterility due to nondisjunction.
Economic uses of sterility
Economic uses of sterility include:
- The production of certain kinds of seedless fruit, such as seedless tomato[4] or watermelon (though sterility is not the only available route to fruit seedlessness);
- genetically modified plantsby causing second-generation seeds to be sterile;
- trap-neuter-return programs for cats; and the sterile insect technique, in which large numbers of sterile insects are released, which compete with fertile insects for food and mates, thus reducing the population size of subsequent generations, which can be used to fight diseases spread by insect vectors such as malaria in mosquitoes.
- Some animals which can produce sterile hybrid offspring because of mating with closely related species like mule, hinny, liger and tigon.
See also
References
- ^ ISSN 2673-4184.
- PMID 33389378.
- ^ "Domestic goat". Read facts about... Archived from the original on 29 November 2014. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
- ^ Kozik EU, Nowakowska M, Staniaszek M, Dyki B, Stepowska A, Nowicki M (December 2013). "More than meets the eye: A multi-year expressivity analysis of tomato sterility in ps and ps-2 lines" (PDF). Australian Journal of Crop Science. 7 (13): 2154–2161.