Development of non-surgical methods of long-term or permanent contraception remains a challenge. Towards this objective, we show that intramuscular injection of a replication-incompetent, recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) designed to express an antibody that binds gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), a master regulator of reproduction in vertebrates, results in long-term infertility in male and female mice. Female mice are also rendered infertile through rAAV-dependent expression of an antibody that binds to the zona pellucida (ZP), a glycoprotein matrix that surrounds the egg and functions as a sperm-binding site. Many proteins known or suspected to be important for reproduction can be targeted, potentially reversibly, using this approach, which we refer to as vectored contraception (VC).

Microgravity was used in an attempt to define the crystal structure of the polyQ repeat of huntingtin alone or bound to MW1, an anti-polyQ Fab. While huntingtin was not crystallized in the experiments, analysis of microgravity-grown and Earth-grown MW1 Fab crystals showed that, on average, microgravity-grown crystals of MW1 Fab showed an increase in size and an improvement in resolution and mosaicity when compared with Earth-grown crystals in one space group, in agreement with data published for other proteins, although the highest overall resolution X-ray data in our experiments were obtained from a crystal grown on Earth.