Department of Environmental and Biological Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland.
Research and Development, Finnish Red Cross Blood Service, Haartmaninkatu 8, 00290 Helsinki, Finland.
Int J Mol Sci. 2022 Mar 22;23(7):3428. doi: 10.3390/ijms23073428.
Infertility is assumed to arise exclusively from male- and female-dependent pathological factors. However, recent studies have indicated that reproductive failure may also result from the reproductive incompatibility of the partners. Selection against such incompatibilities likely occurs via female-derived reproductive secretions, including follicular fluid (FF), that mediate gamete-level mate choice towards the sperm of specific males. To facilitate potential development of diagnostic tests for human reproductive incompatibility, we examined whether sperm physiological response to female serum indicate male-female compatibility in the presence of FF. We performed a full-factorial experiment, in which the sperm of 10 males were treated with the FF and serum of 6 healthy females. We found that sperm motility and viability in both biofluids were highly similar and that in 70% of the males, sperm serum treatment predicted male-female compatibility. We also identified male human leucocyte antigen (HLA) alleles and female (FF and serum) anti-HLA antibodies and tested whether the number of allele-antibody matches predict sperm physiological response to female fluids. However, no association was found between measured sperm traits and the number of allele-antibody matches. Overall, the present results may open novel possibilities for the future development of reproductive incompatibility tests and may pave the way towards more accurate infertility diagnostics and treatments.
不孕不育被认为完全是由男性和女性依赖的病理因素引起的。然而，最近的研究表明，生殖失败也可能是由于伴侣之间的生殖不兼容造成的。通过女性来源的生殖分泌物，包括卵泡液 (FF)，对这种不兼容性进行选择，这些分泌物可以介导配子水平对特定男性精子的配偶选择。为了促进开发人类生殖不兼容性的诊断测试，我们研究了精子对女性血清的生理反应是否能在 FF 存在的情况下指示男性与女性的兼容性。我们进行了一个完全因子实验，其中 10 名男性的精子分别与 6 名健康女性的 FF 和血清进行了处理。我们发现，这两种生物流体中的精子活力和活力高度相似，在 70%的男性中，精子对血清的处理可以预测男性与女性的兼容性。我们还鉴定了男性人类白细胞抗原 (HLA) 等位基因和女性 (FF 和血清) 抗 HLA 抗体，并测试了等位基因-抗体匹配的数量是否可以预测精子对女性体液的生理反应。然而，没有发现测量的精子特征与等位基因-抗体匹配的数量之间存在关联。总的来说，目前的结果可能为生殖不兼容性测试的未来发展开辟新的可能性，并为更准确的不孕不育诊断和治疗铺平道路。
