Aging often brings a drop in fertility, especially for people with uteruses, since eggs are both valuable and limited. Applied physics PhD candidate Yash Rana uncovers a hidden culprit: dysfunction of mitochondria, the cell's powerhouse. Moreover, Rana finds that the quality of eggs also suffers when mitochondria are out of place. Studying mouse eggs as proxies for human ones, he discovered that, just before fertilization, the egg stirs up internal fluid flows that move active mitochondria toward the spindle, the cellular structure that holds DNA. By measuring those flows, Rana hopes to build a model that predicts mitochondrial movement, laying the groundwork for therapies that could fix their positioning and help combat age-related infertility.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
