Aneuploidy Could Explain Variability in Female Fertility: Study

Eggs from girls and from older women show higher rates of errors in chromosome number.

Written byCatherine Offord

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The paper

J.R. Gruhn et al., “Chromosome errors in human eggs shape natural fertility over reproductive life span,” Science, 365:1466–69, 2019.

Female of most mammalian species are fertile throughout their adult life. But humans are different, says University of Copenhagen molecular geneticist Eva Hoffmann. A woman’s fertility follows a curve, increasing from puberty, peaking in her 20s, and falling rapidly starting in her mid-30s.

Researchers attribute this decline partly to a rise in egg aneuploidy, or incorrect chromosome number, which can lead to pregnancy failure. Hoffmann and colleagues wanted to know more about how aneuploidy occurs in human eggs, and whether it’s connected to female fertility from a young age.

The team collected more than 3,000 eggs from women between 9 and 43 years old through a collaboration with IVF clinics and Danish hospitals that preserve ovarian tissue from cancer patients about to undergo chemotherapy. The researchers ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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