Seminars
There are not currently any seminars planned. We will add our seminars to the events calendar below.
Centre for Early Life Christmas Lecture - The evolution of embryo selection with Professor David Haig
Location: Microsoft Teams
Abstract
Organisms that make minimal prezygotic investment in offspring frequently produce more embryos than can be provisioned. The excess embryos are aborted before major commitment of resources. Such a system increases the average fitness of provisioned offspring if embryos of lower expected fitness are selectively culled. A subset of human embryos are similarly aborted in what may be an analogous mechanism of quality control. The earliest stages after conception are expected to be a period in which embryos are required to demonstrate their metabolic efficiency if they are to avoid elimination.