Characterization of mRNA transcripts in spermatozoa of fertile men

Accumulated evidence proves that mature spermatozoa contain a complex yet specific mRNA, which could provide information of the past events of spermatogenesis. Our aim was to quantitatively microdissect these mRNA transcripts by a digital approach. SAGE was used to study the mRNA transcripts from ejaculate of an individual and of a pool of 10 fertile men. SAGE library from individual produced 20237 raw tags representing 2459 unique tags (those tags that show at least twice in the library), and that from pooled 10 men generated 21052 raw tags representing 2712 unique tags. The SAGE view of ejaculate of fertile men has revealed a large number of transcripts, which occur in steady frequencies and probably have important implications in the spermatogenesis and fertilization. Keywords: normal gene expression profile To study the transcripts expression level and their variation in human ejaculate spermatozoa, total RNA extracted from single ejaculate of 10 volunteers were mixed and assigned as “pooled”; for the “individual”, the extracted RNA from 5 separate ejaculate of the same eleventh volunteer were mixed together. And two SAGE libraries were constructed based on these starting RNA materials.