Egg cell mitochondria do not age all at once, and some anti-aging supplements can actually make half of them worse.
Mitochondria were previously treated as a single uniform battery pack that simply runs down as a woman gets older. Research into oocytes shows there are actually distinct subpopulations of these organelles that age at different rates. When given the popular NMN supplement, one group of mitochondria improves while another group begins to fail. This means that a one size fits all approach to rejuvenation can have dangerous, contradictory effects within the same cell. We cannot just blast cells with supplements and expect everything to get younger.
Mitochondrial subpopulations in oocytes and cumulus cells exhibit distinct age-associated changes and selective plasticity in response to NMN supplementation
research_square · rs-9215979
Abstract Background Mitochondrial dysfunction is a leading contributor to the decline in oocyte quality associated with maternal aging. Prior investigations of mitochondrial function in the ovarian follicle have largely treated the mitochondrial pool as a homogeneous population, reporting aggregate values that may obscure biologically meaningful differences between distinct mitochondrial subpopulations. The present study addresses this limitation by characterizing mitochondrial subpopulation dyn