By ASHLEY CHU

With a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a Center for Reproductive Genetics will be established on both Cornells Ithaca and Weill Cornell Medical School campuses.

The CRG is aimed at understanding the genetic basis for processes that give rise to healthy gametes for reproduction, said Prof. Paula Cohen, biomedical sciences, who is director of the CRG. If you dont have healthy eggs and sperm, then this can lead to all sorts of issues such as birth defects, miscarriages, preterm delivery and infertility.

This grant which the University announced it had received on April 1 marks a significant milestone for groups researching reproductive genetics, according to Cohen.

This is the first time that a number of groups are being funded collectively to ask the same questions and, as such, this is likely to bring rapid advances in our knowledge, Cohen said. In science, so often we work in isolated bubbles, but this center grant, which encompasses five different investigators in four different projects, is likely to lead to bigger and quicker advances.

The center aims to address these issues at the basic research level in a joint effort between the two campuses, which Cohen describes as the bench-to-bedside approach.

Given that the CRG is based on both the Ithaca and Weill Cornell campuses, we hope to translate our findings from the lab into the clinic to help infertile couples and to understand how birth defects arise in humans, Cohen said.

The CRGs research focus is to understand how healthy gametes are produced, but more specifically, how the defects that arise during gametogenesis are produced.

This grant will enable cutting-edge research, using the latest technological advances and discoveries, to better understand fundamental processes in mammalian spermatogenesis. Jen Grenier

Given how important healthy eggs and sperm are for sexual reproduction and how conserved the genetic processes are that give rise to these cells, its surprising to find that human gametogenesis the process that gives rise to sperm and eggs is extremely error prone, Cohen said. In fact, between 40 and 60 percent of human eggs contain the wrong complement or number of chromosomes, and this situation can lead to spontaneous miscarriages or birth defects such as Down syndrome and Klinefelter syndrome.

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Center for Reproductive Genetics Established With $10 Million Grant