The Royal Society of Edinburgh has announced that 48 exceptional research projects have been selected at the spring 2024 Research Awards open call. Image Dr Chih-Jen Lin Over £680K across the awardees will enable research across all academic disciplines, with projects including an investigation into the hidden costs of living with disability in Scotland, forecasting the strongest solar flares with physics-informed deep learning, using art to improve custodial experiences, and developing a non-invasive screening tool to assess oocyte and embryo quality. Dr Chih-Jen Lin of CRH has won funding to collaborate with Professor Grażyna Ewa Ptak Jagiellonian, University in Krakow on their work on oocyte screening: 'Oocytes/embryos fat (lipid fingerprint) analyser: Developing a non-invasive screening tool to assess oocyte and embryo quality.' We are excited to receive this round’s RSE International Joint Project. Mammalian egg (oocyte) quality plays a crucial role in female fertility. Despite Assisted Reproductive Techniques being routinely carried out in IVF clinics, an accurate, non-invasive predictor for selecting oocytes and predicting pregnancy outcome is still lacking. In this interdisciplinary project, we have teamed up with Prof Grażyna Ewa Ptak in Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and will apply their newly developed imaging technologies for measurement the lipid composition of oocytes/embryos. We will apply this cutting-edge technique on our unique animal model of infertility to generate a comprehensive profile of good and bad oocytes. We aim to develop a non-invasive tool for screening and selecting oocytes with the highest competency according to their unique lipid composition profiles. Dr Chih-Jen Lin Dr Chih-Jen (Lance) LIN joined the CRH, as a PI in 2015, awarded a RSE Personal Research Fellowship in 2016 and appointed as Lecturer in 2022. His focus is on investigating epigenetic regulation during oocyte-to-embryo transition and how it impacts on female infertility. He generated multiple mouse models of infertility by depletion of the molecules within HIRA complex (Cabin1 and Ubn1), revealing their roles for the oocyte to acquire developmental competence. His demonstration of the role of the HIRA complex in mouse and human zygote formation has been recognised in the ESHRE 2020 Best Basic Science Award. The Cabin1 model has been used to examine oocyte quality, oocyte-to-cell communication and lays the foundation for this project. Besides his lab research, Dr Lin also likes to embrace Scotland’s stunning nature, food (including foraging) and the wild spectrum of “water of life”. RSE announcement Lin research group page This article was published on 2024-09-10
