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Science
13th February 2024
This Month in Science: Blavatnik Early Days of IVF Award win: JIC Becky Sainty Science Writer
In February 1944, Miriam Menkin, was working as a technician for Dr John Rock, achieving the first fertilisation of a human egg outside of the body. Dr John Rock was a fertility specialist at the Free Hospital For Women in Massachusetts. Miriam Menkin, his technician, had previously worked with Gregory Pincus, who was attempting in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) on rabbits. Despite holding a master’s in genetics, Miriam had been unable to pursue her original aim to become a doctor due to rejections from medical school, likely due to her gender. Every week Miriam collected eggs from ovaries surgically removed by Dr Rock, and tried to fertilise them. Dr Rock hoped external fertilisation could help the 1/5th of his infertile patients who had damaged fallopian tubes. After 6 years of meticulous research, including 138 attempts to fertilise eggs
in a petri dish, one week Miriam left the sperm in contact with the egg for 1 hour rather than 30 minutes, and two days later the cells had fused and divided.
In her absence, Dr Rock’s research group did not successfully fertilise another egg, and their group never progressed to transplanting fertilised zygotes back
Science Writer
Dr Yiliang Ding has become the first UK plant scientist to be given a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists. A group leader at the John Innes Centre (JIC), she was one of three honourees in Life Sciences, and will receive money for research as part of the award.
Like many scientific breakthroughs, this fertilisation has been attributed partly to accident. In an interview, Miriam stated she left the incubation for longer because she was tired from soothing her teething daughter throughout the night before. Nevertheless, the fertilisation represented a remarkable achievement for the group. She went on to create further twocell and two three-cell zygotes, and her and Dr Rock published their findings in the journal Science. Unfortunately for Miriam, shortly after the breakthrough, her husband lost his job and she followed him to North Carolina, where IVF research was not supported.
Becky Sainty
Photo: Wikicommons
into women. In the 1950s, after divorcing her husband, Miriam did work again with Dr Rock, who was now focused on developing a contraceptive pill. This groundbreaking human fertilisation laid the foundations for later IVF research, ultimately leading to the first baby conceived from IVF born in 1978, still highlighted as a common method for assisted reproduction today.
Dr Ding has been recognised for developing innovative profiling methods to determine RNA structures inside living cells. RNA is vital for all living organisms. RNA acts as an intermediary; it is created as a copy of the code in a gene, and subsequently used a blueprint to build proteins. However, further research shows RNA can be functional itself, and crucial to this are the complex, dynamic structures it forms. These structures play a part in regulating gene activity, as Dr
Ding’s work is uncovering. Dr Ding has discovered 3D RNA structures which are involved in plant growth, development, and stress responses including cold adaptation. One of the key stages these technologies uncover is the control of RNA degradation, which can be applied in antiviral therapies. Viruses have a major impact on both human health and crop production, especially with reduced use of pesticides. The Ding group and collaborators have developed anti-viral molecules to treat Beet Yellows Virus. This strategy has proved very effective so far when tested in sugar beet plants. The Blavatnik Awards are the largest unrestricted prizes for young UK scientists, and an important part of recognising and supporting scientific innovation.
Research Spotlight: The Sobolewski Lab TNT Express
Hidden away in the dungeons of floor 01 in CAP, the Sobolewski lab is looking at tunnelling nanotubes (TNTs) in lung cancer. Not to get confused with dynamite TNT, our TNTs act like the Eurostar between cells. They connect two cells via a tunnel transporting passengers, such as the mitochondria (aka the powerhouse of the cell), taking regular rides. There is previous evidence from other labs that TNTs are present in cancerous cells and the passengers they transport can cause cancer progression.
Natalia Cicovacki Science Writer
However, the current knowledge is very “messy” - what actually causes them to form and how to tell the difference between an actual TNT or a really tiny weeny bit of the cell that is stretching out, is unanswered. It is also worth mentioning that TNTs form naturally in our bodies for example, immune cells use them to communicate with each other to pass antigenic information. So how can we target the cancerous TNTs and not our helpful ones? With one published paper in the bag and another in the works, the Sobolewski lab is currently zooming into these cell signalling pathways, as well as looking at what other passengers travel along the cells’ Eurostar. One of the pathways the lab is holding a magnifying glass over is that of hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), which causes your cells to grow, organs to regenerate and wounds to heal. In lung cancer, mutations in this signalling pathway and overexpression of HGF have been linked to its invasive growth, and interestingly, resistance to chemotherapy.
Photo: Natalia Cicovacki
This resistance has also been found to be due to TNTs transferring mitochondria. So are TNTs the reason behind how HGF is able to allow lung cancer to grow and become chemo-resistant? My research so far has been investigating the cytoskeleton (cells’ skeleton) as there are a lot of similarities between the HGF and cytoskeletal pathway. This involves adding different inhibitors of the cytoskeletal pathway to lung cancer cells and seeing if there’s any effect, which at the moment is top secret classified information. There are many unanswered questions in the field but we are unified by one: can we hijack the cells’ Eurostar to include chemotherapy drugs as passengers? Photo: Innes Henry
L to R: Salonee Banerjee, Dr. Anastasia Sobolewski, Natalia Cicovacki.