Question: You say you want to find out about how womens eggs go abit 'dogey' as they get older. 1.what do you mean by dogey? 2. also how is it you are going to experiment to find your answer?

Greg FitzHarris answered on 13 Jun 2010:

Hi Becca,
For part 1 — have a look at the extended thing on my scientist profile (is to dpo with eggs having wrong number of chromosomes)

For part 2 — thats a good question… and i could type for months answering it. Here’s a couple of thoughts…

If we can work out in a very detailed way what the differences are between the good eggs from young mothers, and the bad (dodgy) ones from older mothers, maybe we can stop it from happening, or pick out the good ones from the bad. A big ‘hypothesis’ which many people (including me to some extent) believe is that perhaps one or more molecules (proteins, probably) might ‘go off’ or get destroyed as eggs get older.

So, as an example of what we do, we just finished a series of experiments which looked at one particular protein which was a very strong candidate to be one which ‘goes off’. We tried to see if we could make good eggs go bad by removing this protein (i hope this makes sense…). Ie, our ‘hypothesis was that if we artificially get rid of this protein, we will make bad eggs.

Unfortunately, the ‘hypothesis’ turned out to be wrong — when we removed the protein from eggs, the eggs still kept the correct number of chromosomes…. so thats probably NOT the cause of dodgy eggs. It was certain;ly not a waste of time though becausen (a) it was a good idea… and someone had to test it (b) we found out other interesting things about how the egg works in the process….

i hope it makes some sense… and feel free to ask me more…
Greg