The people behind the papers – Mito Kanatsu-Shinohara

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is a common form of assisted reproductive technology that circumvents male fertility issues around sperm production by directly injecting a sperm cell into the cytoplasm of the egg to induce fertilisation. However, the effect of the ICSI procedure on subsequent generations is unclear. In a new study, Mito Kanatsu-Shinohara and colleagues show that the offsprings of ICSI-derived male mice demonstrate inflammation and oxidative stress across multiple organs during embryonic development - including the brain, heart and placenta - leading to higher rates of miscarriage. To learn more about the people behind this paper and how this story developed, we spoke to Mito Kanatsu-Shinohara, Assistant Professor in the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at the Graduate School of Medicine and Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, Japan.