China · Ars Technica
One by one, he sets the rodents on a miniature treadmill that starts slow and gradually speeds up
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 source. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
◌ Single Source
The secret to their speediness isn’t carried in their genes—the animals come from the same genetic stock as a group of control mice.
Key facts
- New clues emerged in 2016, when Colin Conine and Upasna Sharma, postdocs in the lab of epigeneticist Oliver Rando at the University of Massachusetts’ Chan Medical School, and colleagues, cataloged
- That 2025 study adds to mounting evidence that sperm are more than wriggling vessels carrying DNA to an egg
- An important result came in 2024, when Teperino’s lab sourced two mouse strains with enough variation in their mitochondrial DNA that the team could identify which parent certain RNA fragments
- One 2020 study bred anxious mice by injecting sperm with epididymosomes from stressed rodents
Summary
On a bright afternoon in Jiangsu, China, Xin Yin is playing personal trainer to some mice. “I was surprised when I first saw the data,” says Yin, a biochemist at Nanjing University. Yin’s team analyzed the molecules inside the exercising rodents’ sperm and found tiny bits of RNA—dubbed microRNAs—that were present in higher amounts than in the sperm of their idle littermates. That 2025 study adds to mounting evidence that sperm are more than wriggling vessels carrying DNA to an egg.