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Mammalian fertilization is a species-selective event that involves a series of interactions between sperm proteins and the oocyte's zona pellucida (ZP) glycoproteins. Bovine ZP consists of three glycoproteins: bZP2, bZP3, and bZP4. In our previous study, we demonstrated that bovine sperm binds to plastic wells coated with recombinant bZP4 and identified that the N-terminal domain and the middle region of bZP4 are critical for sperm-binding activity. Here, we investigated the sperm-binding site in the middle region (residues 290 to 340) of bZP4, which includes the hinge region. We showed that bovine sperm binds to bZP4's middle region in a species-selective manner. We mapped the function of bZP4's middle region to its N-glycosylation site at Asn-314 using several recombinant mutated proteins. Moreover, we showed that mutations of the N-glycosylation sites at Asn-314 close to the hinge region and Asn-146 of the hinge region of bZP4 and bZP3, respectively, reduced the sperm-binding activity of the complex of the bZP3 (from 32 to 178) and bZP4 (from 136 to 464) fragments. Together, these results suggest that ZP's middle regions of bZP3 and bZP4 form one of the sperm-binding sites of bovine ZP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MoS2 nanomaterial has unique properties, including innate affinity with ss-DNA and quenching ability for fluorescence dyes. Here, we present the development of a simple fluorescence biosensor based on water-soluble MoS2 nanosheets and restriction endonuclease BstUI for methylation analysis of p16 promoter. The biosensing platform exhibited excellent sensitivity in detecting DNA with a linear range of 100 pM~20 nM and a detection limit of 140 pM. More importantly, our method could distinguish as low as 1% difference in methylation level. Compared with previous methylation analysis, our design is both time saving and simple to operate, avoiding the limitations of PCR-based assays without compromising performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]