Background
Ida Marie Astad Jentoft studied molecular biomedicine at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and McGill University in Montreal (Canada). For her Master and subsequent PhD research, she joined the International Max Planck Research School for Molecular Biology in Göttingen. In 2023, Jentoft completed her PhD with Melina Schuh in the Department of Meiosis at the MPI for Multidisciplinary Sciences.
Since 2024, Jentoft has been working as a postdoc at the Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna (Austria).
Cytoplasmic lattices store the proteins
In her doctoral thesis, Ida Marie Astad Jentoft focused on how the required proteins are stored in egg cells. Egg cells are created in the ovaries of a female mammal from birth and remain functional there for months or even years. They have to keep their proteins in stock for a correspondingly long time without being degraded or becoming active at the wrong time.
Jentoft discovered that so-called cytoplasmic lattices – thread-like structures in the cytoplasm – store the proteins. If the lattices were missing in an egg cell, no embryo could develop. Based on this new knowledge, Jentoft and her colleagues suggest that in the future reintroducing the necessary proteins could be a potential approach for women suffering from infertility caused by mutations in cytoplasmic lattice related genes.