Maria M. Viveiros, an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine’s department of physiology and pharmacology, received $445,500 from the National Institutes of Health to develop a unique mouse model to assess the underlying mechanisms of meiotic spindle formation in oocytes, or egg cells. Viveiros will determine whether these mechanisms are disrupted with increasing maternal age, leading to chromosome segregation errors and aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes. Aneuploidy in developing embryos is the leading genetic cause of congenital birth defects and pregnancy loss in women.
