Researchers from the Department of Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology and the Institute for Biotechnology and Biomedicine of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (IBB-UAB) have unmasked the function of a protein involved in DNA repair, ATR, in the meiotic recombination process which takes place during the development of spermatocytes – sperm precursor cells– and how inhibiting this protein causes anomalies which block spermatogenesis.