Research Paper|Volume 16, Issue 4|pp 3350—3362

Single-cell transcriptomics identifies senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) features of testicular aging in human

Junxian He^1,^2,⁴, Jindong Li^3,⁵, Yanqing Li^1,^2,⁴, Zhenhan Xu^1,^2,⁴, Menghui Ma^1,^2,⁴, Haicheng Chen^1,^2,⁴, Peigen Chen^1,^2,⁴, Linyan Lv^1,^2,⁴, Xuejun Shang³, Guihua Liu^1,^2,⁴

¹Reproductive Medicine Center, The Sixth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510655, China
²Biomedical Innovation Center, The Sixth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510655, China
³Department of Andrology, Jinling Hospital, The First School of Clinical Medicine, Southern Medical University, Nanjing 210002, China
⁴Guangdong Engineering Technology Research Center of Fertility Preservation, Guangzhou 510655, China
⁵Department of Urology, Central South University Xiangya School of Medicine Affiliated Haikou Hospital, Haikou 570100, China

* Equal contribution

Received: October 10, 2023Accepted: December 29, 2023Published: February 12, 2024

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205538

Copyright: © 2024 He et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The male reproductive system experiences degradation with age, predominantly impacting the testes. Testicular aging can result in failure to produce physiological testosterone levels, normal sperm concentrations, or both. However, we cannot predict the onset of testicular aging in advance. Using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, we conducted cell-cell communication network of human testis between older and young group, indicating Leydig cells’ potential role in spermatogenesis microenvironment of aging testis. And we depicted the senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype (SASP) features of aging testis by identifying differentially expressed senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP)-related genes between two group. Notably, IGFBP7 mainly expressed in Leydig cells of those differentially expressed SASP-related genes in aging testis. Furthermore, IGFBP7 protein located in the interstitial compartment of older mice confirmed by immunofluorescence and highly expressed in both human seminal plasma and mouse testis in the older group confirmed through Western blot. Together, our findings suggest that IGFBP7 may be a new biomarker of testicular aging.