According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), infertility affects about 10 percent of women (6.1 million) in the United States ages 15-44, with issues ranging from difficulty getting pregnant to issues staying pregnant5. Infertility is defined as not being able to get pregnant after one year of trying (or six months if a woman is 35 or older)5. One approach for treating infertility is to give women exogenous FSH to stimulate multiple ovarian follicles to produce eggs to be retrieved for in vitro fertilization. Responses to FSH treatment vary and FSH stimulation doesn’t always give the desired response. One way to understand infertility and lack of FSH responsiveness on the molecular level is by studying the FSH receptor. The human follicle-stimulating hormone receptor (hFSHR) is a g protein-coupled receptor that plays an important role in sexual development in both men and women. It is important to study this receptor because people who have diminished activity of the receptor will suffer from some degree of infertility. Previous research in the Cohen lab has shown that the FSH receptor resides in microdomains of the membrane known as lipid rafts and associates with a protein known as caveolin. There is evidence that other g protein-coupled receptors interact with caveolin in lipid rafts. We can learn from what these studies did to understand the interaction between these receptors and caveolin to understand the interaction of caveolin with the FSH receptor. By understanding the interaction between the FSH receptor and caveolin we hope to help improve infertility treatments in the future.
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