Cross-sectional study of human spermatozoa mRNA from infertility study participants and proven-fertile control participants

The goal of this study was to identify mRNAs in spermatozoa that differ between idiopathic infertile men and proven-fertile men. The rationale is that there are many idiopathic infertile or subfertile men, and that semen parameters cannot reliably distinguish idopathic infertile men from fertile men. Spermatozoa contain thousands of RNAs, and the levels of those RNAs may reflect the extent of normal spermatogenesis and sperm maturation. We hypothesized that we could identify differences between two patient populations that would reflect their clinical fertility status. Infertility study participants (n=53) presented to Brown Urology for fertility assessment and provided a semen sample. Proven-fertile control study participants (n=14) were men who had fathered children and were presenting for vasectomy. Proven-fertile patients provided a semen sample prior to undergoing the vasectomy procedure. Sperm were isolated from semen samples, and sperm RNA was prepared using an established procedure. mRNA libraries were sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 4000 sequencer in 150 bp paired-end format. Three infertility study participants submitted two samples, which were averaged after sequencing. Those samples are identified as "duplicates" in the sample matrix, and the description column contains the column header that was used in the supplementary file, log2_norm_count_collapsed.csv. Analysis by Wilcoxon signed-rank test identified 1,885 differentially abundant transcripts between the two study populations.