Complete elucidation of fertilization process at molecular level is one of the unresolved challenges in sexual reproduction studies, and understanding the molecular mechanism is crucial in overcoming difficulties in infertility and unsuccessful in vitro fertilization. Sperm-oocyte interaction is one of the most remarkable events in fertilization process, and deficiency in protein-protein interactions which mediate this interaction is a major cause of unexplained infertility. Due to detection of how the various defects of sperm-oocyte interaction can affect fertilization failure, different experimental methods have been applied. This review summarizes the current understanding of sperm-egg interaction mechanism during fertilization and also accumulates the different types of sperm-egg interaction abnormalities and their association with infertility. Several detection approaches regarding sperm-egg protein interactions and the associated defects are reviewed in this paper.
Sperm-egg interaction defect is a significant cause of in-vitro fertilization failure for infertile cases. Numerous molecular interactions in the form of protein-protein interactions mediate the sperm-egg membrane interaction process. Recent studies have demonstrated that in addition to experimental techniques, computational methods, namely protein interaction network approach, can address protein-protein interactions between human sperm and egg. Up to now, no drugs have been detected to treat sperm-egg interaction disorder, and the initial step in drug discovery research is finding out essential proteins or drug targets for a biological process. The main purpose of this study is to identify putative drug targets for human sperm-egg interaction deficiency and consider if the detected essential proteins are targets for any known drugs using protein-protein interaction network and ingenuity pathway analysis.