Perfect egg needs zinc
11 Oct 2010 by Evoluted New Media
The key to a healthy egg is zinc say scientists from Northwestern University who found the egg requires huge amounts of the metal to reach maturity and be ready for fertilisation.
The key to a healthy egg is zinc say scientists from Northwestern University who found the egg requires huge amounts of the metal to reach maturity and be ready for fertilisation.
 |
| Zinc helps the egg reach maturity, ready for fertilisation |
Alison Kim, a postdoctoral researcher, discovered the egg becomes ravenous for zinc and needs a 50% increase in the metal to reach full maturity before becoming fertilised.
“Understanding zinc’s role may eventually help us measure the quality of an egg and lead to advances in fertility treatment,” said Kim, “Currently we can’t predict which eggs isolated from a woman produce the best embryos and will result in a baby. Not all eggs are capable of becoming healthy embryos.”
Kim discovered – using synchrotron-based x-ray fluorescence microscopy – that approximately 60 billion zinc atoms were required in a mouse egg just before it was ready to be fertilised. The zinc appears to flip a switch so that the egg can progress through the final stages of meiosis.
“Zinc helps the egg exit from a holding pattern to its final critical stage of development,” said co-author Tom O’Halloran, director of the Chemistry of Life Process Institute. “It’s on the knife’s edge of becoming a new life form or becoming a cell that dies. It has only 24 hours,” he added, “Zinc seems to be a key switch that helps control whether the egg moves forward in its development stage.
The scientists blocked the accumulation of zinc in a maturing egg, and found this caused the egg to pause prematurely at the beginning of meiosis. This was restored by returning zinc to the egg.
Kim now plans to research the link between zinc content in the egg and the nutritional status of women.
