EMBO Gold Medal awarded to Elvan Böke

The scientist is recognized for her pioneering research on physiological mechanisms that enable oocytes to stay healthy over decades of dormancy

2024-06-25

(Press-News.org) EMBO awards the EMBO Gold Medal 2024 to Elvan Böke, group leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain. The award recognizes researchers under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to the life sciences in Europe. The awardee receives a gold medal and a bursary of 10,000 euros.

Early-stage oocytes are exposed to biological and environmental factors for decades, which can make them susceptible to cumulative damage. At the same time, the growth phases associated with oocyte maturation could cause defects due to exposure to harmful substances or lifestyle factors.1

“Elvan Böke’s work has yielded ground-breaking insights into a key mechanism used by oocytes to reduce free radical damage,” said Anthony Hyman, EMBO Member and Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany. “She has built a unique research direction in the few years of her independence as a researcher.”

“More recently, her lab tackled the important question of how long-lasting oocytes can deal with misfolded proteins aggregates accumulated during their rest in the ovary. They have discovered a completely novel structure, a super-organelle,” added Marie-Hélène Verlhac, EMBO Member and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology (CIRB), Paris, France. “Elvan Böke has a very original approach of an extensively studied model system, the mammalian oocytes, and she has brought a fresh eye, asking novel and important biological questions,” she said.

“Elvan Böke’s group is tackling multiple questions in oocyte biology, centered around the unique properties of a cell that grows to an unusual size and spends months to years in a dormant state, all while protecting the germline genome. These are fascinating fundamental questions that lie at the heart of the germline-soma divide. They are also central to reproductive aging in women, which is a major societal and medical issue,” commented Timothy Mitchison, EMBO Associate Member and Professor of Systems Biology at the Blatvatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.

Elvan Böke was an undergraduate student at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and a graduate student at Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, Manchester, UK, before becoming a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. Since 2017, she has been leading a group in the quantitative cell biology programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona, Spain.

Elvan Böke will give an award lecture at Cell Bio2024, the ASCB | EMBO meeting taking place in San Diego, USA, from 14 to 18 December 2024.

1) https://www.crg.eu/en/news/when-do-oocytes-begin-experience-effects-age (retrieved 19 June 2024)

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