Saskatchewan on the Discover list…

Here’s this week’s science column:

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SCIENCE

By Edward Willett

Each year, Discover Magazine creates a list of the top 100 science stories of that year. This year’s list is especially exciting for the University of Saskatchewan, because one project conducted at the University and another involving a U. of S. professor were on the list.

One project could lead to the rewriting of medical textbooks on the topic of ovulation, and the other could read to the rewriting of the history of the universe. Not bad!

In the first project, led by Dr. Roger Pierson, Director of the Reproductive Biology Research Unit at the U of S, 63 female volunteers, aged 18 to 40, underwent daily ultrasound scans for a month. The data revealed that medicine’s understanding of the menstrual cycle was incomplete.

The way current textbooks describe it, a woman’s ovaries develop a cluster of three to 12 egg-carrying follicles early in a cycle; one dominant follicle eventually ripens and releases an egg into the fallopian tubes.

But in the Saskatoon study 50 of the 63 woman actually had two to three waves of egg-follicle development before ovulation, and during each wave, some of the women had an egg follicle that grew larger than the rest, signaling the potential for ovulating.

The findings could explain why some women ovulate even while taking birth control; they could also mean that up to 40 percent of women can’t count on natural family planning methods, because there’s always a follicle capable of ovulating no matter what the time of month. Further research will be needed to see if the same number of waves occur consistently every month and to determine why a particular egg is selected to ovulate, and could eventually lead to better, safer contraceptives and better ways of helping women who have difficulty conceiving.

The research, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health, might never have taken place if not for the fact that the University of Saskatchewan, rather unusually, has both a medical college and a veterinarian college on the same campus. When Dr. Pierson started noticing follicular development in women occurring when the textbooks said it shouldn’t, it reminded him of work he did with veterinarian Dr. Gregg Adams at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s. Together, the two of them had discovered that follicular development in cows happens in waves. As it happens, Dr. Adams is now a professor at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the U. of S., and so they worked together again on the new study.

However, the lead author of the published study is Angela Baerwald, for whom it was part of her thesis work. She received her Ph.D. in clinical reproductive biology shortly before the article appeared in July in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

The unsung heroes, however, were the 63 women who took part in the study. “As I’ve gone around the country talking about this work, people just can’t believe the dedication of our research volunteers,” Dr. Pierson says.

The other project with a U. of S. connection cited in Discover’s year-end list was the one that led to the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle, a “pentaquark.” One member of the Japanese-led international team that discovered the new particle was University of Saskatchewan physicist Chary Rangacharyulu.

I wrote about the pentaquark in detail in September; briefly, all sub-atomic particles are made of quarks, but up until now, we only knew of particles made up of either three quarks (the “baryons,” which include protons and neutrons and are stable and long-lived) or two quarks (the “mesons,” which are unstable and short-lived).

Theory allowed for particles made up of five quarks, but the elusive “pentaquark” wasn’t discovered until the team Rangacharyulu is on, led by Takashi Nakano of Osaka University, took another look at results from a 2001 experiment in which they fired high-energy gamma rays at carbon atoms, using a Japanese synchrotron. They discovered evidence of around 20 particles that fit the parameters for pentaquarks. Since then, other experimenters around the world have discovered evidence of pentaquarks in their own data or carried out experiments specifically designed to create these new particles, which have been dubbed “theta-plus.”

“There are other combinations of pentaquarks to be found,” Professor Rangacharyulu predicts. And he notes that future work in this field could take place in Saskatoon, where one of the world’s most powerful synchrotrons, the Canadian Light Source, will begin operation this spring.

Which means that there may be a lot more mention of Saskatchewan in lists of the top science stories in future years!

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2004/01/saskatchewan-on-the-discover-list/

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