1. Evaluation of clusterin gene expression in infertile man
Mardi Mamaghani A1, Hosseini J2
Department of Biology, East Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Andrology, Reproductive Biomedicine Research Center, Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine, ACECR, Tehran, Iran.
Objectives
Infertility refers to the inability of couples to achieve successful pregnancy after a year of sexual intercourse without prevention and occurs in both males and females for various reasons. About half of the infertility causes is due to male factors such as azoospermia. Azoospermia is a male disorder observed in 1% of the general population and in 10–15% of infertile men that is defined as the absence of spermatozoa in the ejaculate. Azoosperima is divided into two types: NOA and OA. Approximately 60% of these cases are due to NOA, a condition in which men have impaired spermatogenesis, the process of sperm production. NOA men require TESE (Testicular Sperm Extraction) for sperm retrieval with assisted reproduction techniques to allow fertility. Spermatogenesis is an extraordinary complex process which participation of several cell types, hormones, paracrine factors and genes are required for the differentiation of spermatogonia into spermatozoa. Clusterin as a candidate gene has been shown to play important roles in several pathophysiological processes, including sperm maturation. To end this, in this project we aimed to understand the role of Clusterin gene in spermatogenesis process, the expression of this gene was investigated in the testis tissue in NOA (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Type of Azoospermia
Materials & Methods
The study population included 42 infertile NOA men referred to Royan institute. Based on the results of their testicular biopsy, patients were categorized into two groups: TESE+ (positive sperm retrieval) and TESE- (negative sperm retrieval). The testicular tissue samples were obtained from the surgery for molecular analysis. The genomic RNA was then extracted by Trizol and converted to cDNA. The gene expression was investigated by Real-time PCR technique. The achieved data were analyzed using SPSS18 software. The Pvalue ≤ 0.05 was considered significant.
Results
The present study showed that based on the Real-time PCR results, the expression level of clusterin gene in TESE+ group was significantly higher than TESE- group. (P = 0.035) (Diagram 1).
Diagram 1: Gene Expression
Conclusion
According to the results of this limited study, the Clusterin gene expression may have a role in spermatogenesis as its expression was significantly low in patients with no sperm even after TESE surgery.