At the Frontiers in Reproduction
(Week 1)
For the past week, I’ve been at a reproductive biology training course hosted at the Woods Hole Marine Biology lab1.
The first week focused on hormonal signaling and the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. I didn’t know a lot about this before, since I mainly focused on early ovarian development, but it’s super interesting.
We also did some labs; most of the techniques (cell culture, qPCR, Western blots, etc.) I already knew, but I learned to microinject frog oocytes/zygotes which was very cool. I made some white tadpoles by injecting Cas9/sgRNA RNPs to knock out a transporter gene involved in melanin synthesis. Future labs will be even more advanced techniques (like IVF on mice) and I’m very excited for those.
The course (along with writing and data analysis I’m doing for my PhD research) will take up nearly all of my time for the next 5 weeks, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to publish some really interesting posts about reproduction. Stay tuned!
It’s not focused on marine biology, we were just using Xenopus laevis as a model since the oocytes are large and easy to inject.
Cool!
When I reviewed possible future reproductive technologies, IVF seemed central to a lot of them. I would be interested to hear what you learn about research to improve IVF.