The Aurora Kinase C c.144delC mutation causes meiosis I arrest in men and is frequent in the North African population.

Infertility concerns a minimum of 70 million couples worldwide. An important proportion of cases is believed to have a genetic component, yet few causal genes have been identified so far. In a previous study, we demonstrated that a homozygous mutation (c.

E-learning for students in their first year: a French experimentation at the medical school of Grenoble.

A local study carried out in the Medical School of Grenoble shows that teaching in the first year in medicine studies satisfies neither the students, nor the teachers. The Faculty of Medicine of Grenoble decided to set up a reform in order to offer a high quality education. This reform leads to a complete reorganization of the curriculum and to the intensive use of new information and communication technologies of information, in particular, the use of multimedia documents.

Homozygous mutation of AURKC yields large-headed polyploid spermatozoa and causes male infertility.

The World Health Organization conservatively estimates that 80 million people suffer from infertility worldwide. Male factors are believed to be responsible for 20-50% of all infertility cases, but microdeletions of the Y chromosome are the only genetic defects altering human spermatogenesis that have been reported repeatedly. We focused our work on infertile men with a normal somatic karyotype but typical spermatozoa mainly characterized by large heads, a variable number of tails and an increased chromosomal content (OMIM 243060).

[Epigenetics of the sperm cell].

In addition to genetic information, the spermatozoon carries another type of information, named epigenetic, which is not associated with variations of the DNA sequence. In somatic cells, it is now generally admitted that epigenetic information is not only regulated by DNA methylation but also involves modifications of the genome structure, or epigenome. During male germ cell maturation, the epigenome is globally re-organized, since most histones, which are associated to DNA in somatic cells, are removed and replaced by sperm specific nuclear proteins, the protamines, responsible for the tight compaction of the sperm DNA.