By increasing air flow around the eggs, egg clustering may also enhance egg water exchange46,47,48, reduce the risk of mold49 or promote hatching synchrony (i.e. egg communication50,51).
The technique promises nutritionally enhanced eggs, bread without gluten, and pest-resistant wheat.
"Oestrogen," explains Whitehead, "is a byproduct of egg maturation".
Scientists have long been amazed by the egg maturation process.
The ability of some eggs to develop a polyspermy-preventing reaction depends on a molecular rearrangement of the egg surface that occurs during egg maturation (oogenesis).
Questions of human egg maturation and its anomalies, and achieving human fertilisation in vitro, came to dominate his interests during his early days in Cambridge.
In some species egg maturation is delayed several months after the final molt, and the females do not lay the eggs until they have matured.
One is interfering with the final steps of egg maturation, so that any eggs released are either immature or past their prime.
Now, Aaron J. W. Hsueh and Jing Li of Stanford University and their colleagues in Japan and China report that they have solved the egg maturation puzzle.
In such women, heteroplasmy levels can be increased by phenomena such as selective replication of mtDNA and mitochondrial bottleneck, in which only a select number of mtDNA molecules are transferred to eggs at the time of egg maturation.
Three-day-old female E. nassaui have reached their maximum egg complement so are not limited by egg maturation (Murray 2010).
