Emily Que's postdoctoral research at Northwestern University is featured at number 47 in Discover Magazine's 100 Top Stories of 2016.
Zinc Spark
In 2014, Que's postdoctoral research with Professors Tom O'Halloran and Teresa Woodruff focused on imaging and quantifying zinc in mouse eggs during fertilization was published by the journal Nature Chemistry. A subsequent project based on this earlier research was recently published in Scientific Reports and is featured in Discover Magazine. The group activated discarded eggs from human IVF and showed that human eggs exocytose zinc ("zinc sparks") upon activation, in line with intracellular rises in calcium, suggesting that zinc is an early extracellular signature of human fertilization. O'Halloran and Woodruff hope to harness this discovery to improve IVF procedures.