Around Eggs

With an increasing amount of women choosing to have children later in life, reproductive research has never been more important. Many studies have investigated why women are less able to produce healthy eggs as they get older, and why these unhealthy eggs often lead to miscarriages, birth defects and even infertility. But more recent research has looked into the environment where a woman’s eggs develop – the ovarian stroma. By contrasting the tissue of young mice (comparable with women in their early twenties) and older mice (comparable with women in their late thirties), researchers saw a large amount of scarring caused by an accumulation of collagen fibres (pictured) and inflammation. This altered, ageing environment could contribute to the decrease in quality of a woman’s eggs as she ages, and could provide a new route into delaying ovarian ageing.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image courtesy of Francesca Duncan, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
• Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, Kansas, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Reproduction, September 2016