Mitochondrial DNA deletion and male infertility

Abstract

MITOCHONDRIAL DNA DELETIONS AND MALE INFERTILITY Salerno Barbara, Gerardi Eliana and Elena Carra Dipartimento di Biologia Cellulare e dello Sviluppo,Università di Palermo Viale delle Scienze, Palermo, Italy; In men, oligozoospermia, asthenozoospermia, teratozoospermia and azoospermia are the main causes of infertility. The present research is aimed to investigate if mtDNA deletions can cause sperm defects in idiopathic astenozoospermic patients with different sperm motility and sperm concentration. The aim of this investigation was to test the hypothesis that whole sperm samples with lower levels of motility would have a higher incidence of spermatozoa with deletions in mitochondrial genome. We were able to evidence mtDNA when the DNA was amplified from the non motile fraction from semen samples or whether DNA from whole sperm samples was employed long PCR. In conclusion this study have demonstrated that the use of LPCR clearly indicated mtDNA in patients OAT also with small amount of whole seminal samples. A further indication is that the ND5 and ND6 mtDNA region were preferentially associated to deletions with poor quality semen characteristic.