A platform utilizing Drosophila ovulation for nonhormonal contraceptive screening

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Significance Due to undesirable side effects and other risk factors of current hormonal contraceptives, the world has increasing demand for novel nonsteroidal contraceptives. Unfortunately, the development of nonsteroidal contraceptives for women is completely stalled due to little investment from big pharmaceutical companies in this field and lack of effective screening platforms. In this manuscript, we describe a phenotypic screening platform utilizing a Drosophila ovulation assay to identify lead compounds that can efficiently inhibit follicle rupture, a final step of releasing mature oocytes during ovulation. In addition, we demonstrate that lead compounds identified from Drosophila ovulation could inhibit follicle rupture in mice and have great potential to become nonsteroidal contraceptives for women.