thermotaxis การใช้

• Thermotaxis is movement along a gradient of temperature.
• Recent research suggests that mammalian sperm employ thermotaxis to move to an appropriate location in the female's oviduct ( see Sperm guidance ).
• Sperm guidance by either chemotaxis or thermotaxis can potentially be used to obtain sperm populations that are enriched with capacitated spermatozoa for in vitro fertilization procedures.
• "M . incognita " has been found to be able to move along shallower temperature gradients ( 0.001C / cm ) than any other known organism, an example of thermotaxis.
• The temperature gradient in the rabbit oviduct was calculated to be at the order of 0.1 癈 / cm ( Bahat and Eisenbach, 2006 ), within the range of known thermotaxis systems.
• Since temperature affects almost every process, much attention has been devoted to the question of whether the measurements, mentioned just above, truly demonstrate thermotaxis or whether they reflect another temperature-dependent process.
• Following the suggestion of Hunter ( 1998 ) that this temperature difference might serve as a cue for guiding spermatozoa to the site of fertilization, Bahat et al . ( 2003 ) demonstrated that rabbit and human spermatozoa are able to sense small temperature differences and respond to them by thermotaxis.
• This belief was taken apart when it became clear that only few of the ejaculated spermatozoa  in humans, only ~ 1 of every million spermatozoa  succeed in entering the oviducts ( Fallopian tubes ) and when more recent studies showed that mammalian spermatozoa employ at least three different mechanisms, each of which can potentially serve as a guidance mechanism : chemotaxis, thermotaxis and rheotaxis.