How Babies are REALLY Made!

How does life begin?

Our speakers will explore the remarkable journey sperm takes to reach and fertilize an egg, and how scientists study changes in a mother's body to better understand pregnancy and predict complications like preeclampsia.

Join us for an engaging, accessible look at how babies are REALLY made, far beyond what you learned in health class.

https://providers.ucsd.edu/details/11571/obstetrics-&-gynecology, https://www.mohdconsortium.org/multi-omics https://preventcohorts.org/

Louise Laurent (she/her/hers)

Investigating Pregnancy through the Lens of Multi-Omics

Pregnancy is one of the most rewarding and dangerous experiences in a woman’s life. To improve outcomes for both mother and baby, we need to better understand both normal and complicated pregnancies. My uses multi-omics to analyze a variety of pregnancy-related biosamples. I will talk about how we discovered extracellular RNA biomarkers in the maternal blood for prediction and diagnosis of preeclampsia, and also how we are using spatial omics to discover new cell types in the human placenta.

Pascal Gagneux

Secret Life and Death of Sperm

Conception occurs when a live sperm fuses with a live egg. This sperm is usually one of about two hundred million sperm that arrive during mating. At least one sperm has to survive the perilous journey towards the upper oviduct, if it is to fertilize an egg and produce the first cell of a new individual. I will walk you through this incredible journey, by a very unusual cell type, a haploid cell that is highly motile and functions without any active gene expression.