• Question: What type of experiments do you do?? Does it help in reserch of IVF??

    Asked by taz2010 to Claire, Greg, Jane, Vicki on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Claire O'Donnell

      Claire O'Donnell answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hi taz,
      I don’t do experiments anymore I analyse other people’s results. The others will bea ble to give you some pretty interesting info though:)

    • Photo: Jane Cleal

      Jane Cleal answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      Hi taz,
      I look at the human placenta, this is the thing that attaches the baby in the womb and gets the mum’s food to it along the umbilical cord. I work out how the food gets to the baby, the baby needs enough fiood or it will grow badly and get ill. So my work will help make sure babies get enough food in the womb and grow properly. This is important for all babies not just ivf babies.
      J x

    • Photo: Vicki Onions

      Vicki Onions answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi Taz
      My work involves trying to freeze whole ovaries and then thaw them out to see if they still work (with the hope that one day we could transplant them back). This would be used for girls and young women whose ovaries are at risk of being damaged, for example by chemo or radiotherapies, so they no longer work. So we hope that when it finally works, you could take the ovary out before treatment begins and feeeze it away out of harms way. When the treatment has finished and the woman would like to have children, you could thaw out the ovary and transplant it back and it would be unaffected by the treatment she had had.
      So, to answer your question, the sorts of experiments i do are freezing whole sheep ovaries in a special freezing machine (and we try different methods of doing this to see which works better) and then thaw them out (again different methods can be used). Then we do lots of tests on the different cells to see if they still work; we use different stains which can tell you if the cells are still viable and we also use techniques to look at different types of gene expression to see f that can tell us whats happneing in the ovary.
      So my work is not directyl related to IVF research no, BUT! It may be that following whole ovary transplants IVF may be needed for subsequent pregnancy

    • Photo: Greg FitzHarris

      Greg FitzHarris answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      hi there,
      check out my profile… we try to work out how eggs keep the amount of chromosomes they have (DNA) correct. This involves a structure called the ‘spindle’. We work ojn the idea that as eggs get older, the spindle stops working correctly, and so eggs end up with the wrong number of chromosomes… which causes infertiluity.

      to what extent this is correct, and how this all works is what we’re trying to figure out…

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