The National Institute Of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health has awarded assistant professor Melissa Wilson Sayres a $380,460 Maximizing Investigator Research Award grant for "Population dynamics and medical consequences of sex chromosome evolution" (Award Number R35GM124827). This grant will support her lab’s cutting edge research in studying human sex chromosomes and the role of genetics in sex differences in human health.

To start, the Wilson Sayres lab will work to study the most fundamental sex differences in the human placenta, one of the earliest tissues formed. While the placenta forms in the pregnant person, it is primarily tissue from the developing fetus and is critical for early life development.

“Amazingly, we know very little about sex differences in the placenta,” Wilson Sayres said. “My lab hypothesizes that sex differences in the placenta may underlie later sex differences in human diseases.”

According to Wilson Sayres, developing a reference for human sex differences in the placenta will be useful for researchers studying other developmental diseases.

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.