Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 24 pp 12581—12599
FOXP3 pathogenic variants cause male infertility through affecting the proliferation and apoptosis of human spermatogonial stem cells
Figure 3. Cell proliferation and apoptosis in the testis of FOXP3-mut NOA patients and OA controls. (A, B) Immunohistochemical staining showed the levels of PCNA (A) and Ki67 (B), the hallmarks for cell proliferation, were decreased in FOXP3-mut NOA patients (lower panels) compared to the OA controls (upper panels). (C) TUNEL assay demonstrated the TUNEL-positive cells (red fluorescence) in FOXP3-mut NOA patients and OA controls. DAPI (blue fluorescence) was used to label cellular nuclei. Replacing the TdT enzyme with PBS was used as the negative control. Scale bars in A-C= 20 μm. (D) The percentages of apoptosis in male germ cells of FOXP3-mut NOA patients and OA controls were calculated using Student’s t-test. All values are means ± SD from three independent experiments. * indicated statistically significant differences (p<0.05).