An old ovary can be rewritten by its host: aged grafts ovulate and produce live pups in young mice
Ovarian aging is not a one-way, fixed process. Using an ovary-specific transcriptomic clock, OvaAge, alongside epigenetic and pathway methylation clocks, researchers transplanted old ovaries into young mice and young ovaries into old mice and found that ovarian molecular age shifts in both directions with host age, but only partially. Ovaries from 13-month-old donors supported full-term pregnancy and live births at 17-18 months of age in young hosts, whereas ovaries of the same age failed to reproduce in old hosts.