Research Paper Volume 16, Issue 4 pp 3350—3362
Single-cell transcriptomics identifies senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) features of testicular aging in human
- 1 Reproductive Medicine Center, The Sixth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510655, China
- 2 Biomedical Innovation Center, The Sixth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510655, China
- 3 Department of Andrology, Jinling Hospital, The First School of Clinical Medicine, Southern Medical University, Nanjing 210002, China
- 4 Guangdong Engineering Technology Research Center of Fertility Preservation, Guangzhou 510655, China
- 5 Department of Urology, Central South University Xiangya School of Medicine Affiliated Haikou Hospital, Haikou 570100, China
Received: October 10, 2023 Accepted: December 29, 2023 Published: February 12, 2024
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205538How to Cite
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.