Purpose: Many young adults are in a state of stress due to social and psychological pressures, which may result in male reproductive dysfunction. To provide new insight into this phenomenon, we investigated the relationship between pathological changes in rat spermatogenic cells and the expression of genes specific to spermatogenic cell types under different stress conditions.
Methods: After establishing rat stress models of different time durations, we observed pathological changes in testicular tissues through haematoxylin and eosin staining, and analysed gene expression in spermatogenic cells by RNA-seq, bioinformatic analysis, and reverse transcription qPCR (RT-qPCR).Three testicular samples were taken from each group to construct 12 cDNA libraries. For each sample, 3 μg RNA was used as the starting material. Ribosomal RNA was removed using the Epicentre Ribo-Zero™ Gold kit (Rat) (Epicentre, an Illumina company, Madison, WI, USA).
Results:Compared with the control group, there were 1,194 DEGs in the 3-day RS+IS group , including 455 upregulated genes and 739 downregulated genes , 1,774 DEGs in the 14-day RS+IS group including 1,124 upregulated genes and 650 downregulated genes, and 2,267 DEGs in the 21-day RS+IS group including 1,366 upregulated genes and 901 downregulated genes. Mean-while, some same expression patterns were observed in three phenotypes.After comparison with single-cell sequencing data, 349 DEGs of spermatogenic cells at different developmental stages were found.
Conclusions: Our study suggest that chronic psychosomatic stress can affect the spermatogenic transcriptome of the testes, leading to a significant change in the expression of the spermatogenic genes. At the same time, histopathological and immunohistochemical results showed that chronic stress may lead to pathological changes in spermatogenic cells and to a significant decrease in key regulatory proteins
Overall design: Testis transcriptome profiles of adult wild type (WT) and RS+IS rats were generated by RNA sequencing
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