Folding Over Ovaries

Major aspects of fertility are determined before we’re even born. The dense arrangement of egg-carrying follicles in the ovaries are laid out in early development. Some of these follicles act as the lifetime reserve of eggs, and with a finite supply getting everything in proper order is essential to establishing fertility. But how this sorting happens is not fully understood. To learn more, researchers examined mouse ovaries at various stages of development using high resolution 3D imaging (pictured), to watch the process like in a stop-motion film. They saw that the ends of each ovary fold towards each other before birth, and that follicle sorting happens at the same time. Simultaneous reshaping of nearby ligaments may point to the forces behind the changes, and this information about how structural transformations are early determinants of egg reserves will help researchers better understand, prevent, and treat infertility.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Jennifer McKey and colleagues
• Department of Cell Biology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, September 2022