One of our favorite ovary images

Excited to share that we've received an NIH R35 MIRA! This grant will support our work building tools to study how cell states change over space and time in disease. Grateful to our community, and especially the wonderful team I get to work with.

@yalecvrc.bsky.social

7/🌟Our findings go beyond reproduction: we present a model for how multicellular organization sustains tissue function and how its disruption drives organ-level decline. These principles may apply broadly to aging in other dynamically remodeling tissues.

6/ Aging also disrupts spatial coordination between neighboring follicles, driven by stromal changes affecting ECM remodeling & paracrine signaling. Tissue-wide inflammation further compromises organization across multiple scales 🗺️

5/ Aging breaks the temporal precision of ovarian cycles. Folliculogenesis and corpus luteum (CL) clearance lose synchronization, leading to persistent CLs, ensuing chronic inflammation, and breakdown of the ovary’s precise temporal choreography📉

4/🔍We discovered a spatial division of labor within follicles: inner granulosa cells drive proliferation & hormone sensing, while outer granulosa cells specialize in steroid hormone production. An elegant solution balancing growth & hormone production! ⚖️

3/👣We could now study a dynamic process captured across space and time! Using optimal transport, we reconstructed folliculogenesis from these snapshots of the ovary, which revealed the progression of preantral → antral follicles, and atresia occurring throughout.

2/🧬Using Slide-seq, we built a high-resolution atlas of ovarian aging, profiling 601,831 spots across 68 spatial transcriptomes. This captured the development & interactions of 345 oocytes, 653 follicles, and 234 corpora lutea in their native tissue context.

1/⌛️The ovary is among the first organs to age. The entire organ cycles hundreds of times to regulate follicle maturation, ovulation & hormone production, what we call 'homeostatic cycling'. How aging disrupts these multicellular interactions is unknown.

Excited to share our lab's first preprint: we used spatial transcriptomics to dissect how aging disrupts the cycling ovary! 🧵

This was an incredible team effort w/ @jennifergarrison.bsky.social #TammyLan @davidsebfischer.bsky.social #AlisonKochersberger #RuthRaichur #SophiaSzady