GFRα1+, NGN3+ and KIT+ spermatogonia of adult mouse testes. Mus musculus

In adult mouse testis, undifferentiated spermatogonia include GFRα1+ and NGN3+ populations. The former mainly act as self-renewing stem cells that support steady-state spermatogenesis. Whilst, the latter are primed for differentiation, but retain the potential of self-renewal and contribute to regeneration and post-transplantation colony formation (Nakagawa et al. science .2010; Hara et al. cell stem cell. 2014). And, NGN3+ cells can differentiate to KIT+ cells, which are also mentioned differentiated spermatogonia, by retinoic acid signal. The gene expression profiles of GFRα1+, NGN3+ and KIT+ spermatogonia, as well as the whole testis samples, were investigated here by microarray (Ikami et al. development. 2015). Overall design: GFRα1+ spermatogonia were isolated by FACS from cell suspensions prepared from the testes of GFRα1-EGFP knock-in (Enomoto et al. development. 2000). NGN3+ and KIT+ spermatogonia were isolated from Ngn3-EGFP transgenic (Yoshida et al. Dev Biol. 2004) mice as GFP+/KIT- and GFP+/KIT+ fractions, respectively. Each GFRα1+ or KIT+ fraction was collected from a single individual, while each NGN3+ fraction was pooled from two mice. In addition, whole testes samples were prepared from WT littermates of GFRα1-EGFP knock-in mouse. All animals were sacrificed at the age of 10-11 weeks old.