 Join CalTV as we interview Dr. Polina Lyshko, a winner of one of this year's Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship Awards for Scientific Excellence. Our focus is reproductive biology and we want to understand the molecular physiology of sperm cell and the egg, basically how fertilization takes place. Sperm cell could be a good model to understand molecular mechanism of asteroid hormone signaling in both systems, in neuroscience as well as in reproductive biology. We treat sperm cells almost like neurons with a tail. Sperm cells are attached to the glass coverslips and then we approach them with a pipette with a recording electrode inside this pipette and we form a very tight seal and then we have to break the membrane between the pipette and the cell and perfuse the cell entirely with our pipette solution. So those spiky dots are actually ions and in this particular case they are potassium ions. The plasma membrane has ion channels which we can open or close depending on different electrical voltage. Dr. Lyshko is researching to develop more advanced tests for male fertility, fertilization methods and unisex contraceptives. Basically if you want to develop contraceptive tools or if you want to help people with infertility problem, you need to understand what exactly happens on molecular level, what makes sperm cell fertile or what makes it infertile. In the lab using different animal models using human, red, mouse, primates, bovine, different animal models to understand how similar they are and how different those germ cells are. I think one of my favorite quotes I recently came across is good things come to those who never give up. So I guess it would be true for any endeavor, whether it's science or anything else in life. Sometimes it looks like it's very hard to achieve and things are against you but just with little bit more try, with little bit more push, everything is possible.