Single-cell transcriptome profiling implicates the psychological stress-induced disruption of spermatogenesis

Male infertility has become a global problem. And psychological stress has been proven to be an important cause of male infertility. In this work, we constructed a terrified-sound stress model in SD rats and performed single-cell RNA sequencing of the testicular tissues from the post-stressed and normal rats. Through the comparative analysis of the gene expression patterns of the 11,744 rat testicular cells, we revealed the potential mechanism by which terrified-sound induced psychological stress affects spermatogenesis and ultimately leads to reproductive impairment in male rats. This will provide a theoretical basis for the study of psychological stress on male reproductive impairments for other animals and humans, and further find the therapeutic targets for male infertility caused by psychological stress. Overall design: We constructed a terrified-sound stress model in SD rats and performed single-cell RNA sequencing of the testicular tissues from 3 post-stressed rats and 3 normal rats.