Project (Melina Schuh)

Meiosis in mammalian oocytes

Egg and sperm develop in a process called meiosis. Despite its importance, meiosis is still only poorly understood and hence of great interest from a basic research point of view. In addition, it is of medical relevance: depending on the age of the woman, 10% to more than 50% of human eggs are aneuploid due to chromosome segregation errors during the first and second meiotic division. This makes aneuploidy in eggs the most common cause of pregnancy losses and age-related infertility.
Research in the Schuh lab falls into three areas: (i) we investigate how the oocyte’s cytoskeleton drives meiosis, and how defects at the interface between chromosomes and cytoskeletal structures lead to aneuploid eggs and pregnancy loss; (ii) we aim to understand why female fertility declines with advancing maternal age, and to develop methods that will allow more couples to conceive; (iii) we develop new tools to study meiosis in mammalian oocytes in order to open new venues for research for the Department and for the meiosis community.
The work in our laboratory combines several innovative approaches towards understanding the fundamental principles underlying meiosis, including advanced microscopy techniques (such as super-resolution, light sheet, expansion, and focused ion beam electron microscopy), loss-of-function approaches (Trim-Away, RNAi in cultured follicles, and mouse genetics), as well as in vitro ovarian culture and sequencing (including single-cell RNA-seq). Most of our work is carried out in mouse oocytes, which are easily available and can be studied with state-of-the-art molecular biology, genetic and advanced imaging tools. In addition, we are studying selected aspects of meiosis in human oocytes. Moreover, we use bovine and porcine oocytes as model systems for aspects of meiosis that are not well conserved in the mouse. Studies of early embryo development are carried out in bovine embryos, which closely resemble human embryos.
We offer several exciting projects in these areas, which combine computational and experimental work. We are looking for highly motivated students with a background in bioinformatics, cell biology or genetics who are interested in joining our friendly, international and multidisciplinary team.