Purpose: The purpose of this research was to study the association between the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the tektin-t gene and idiopathic asthenozoospermia.
Methods: We conducted sequence analyses of the tektin-t gene in 104 idiopathic asthenozoospermia and 102 fertile men with normospermic parameters in Sichuan, China.
Results: In this study, we found that allele 136 T (odds ratio [OR] 1.745, 95 % confidence interval [CI] 1.146-2.655, P = 0.009) was significantly increased in idiopathic asthenozoospermic patients compared with fertile men. This mutation substitutes a highly conserved arginine at position 46 to cysteine. Moreover, PolyPhen-2 analysis predicted that this variant was "probably damaging". In addition, a novel heterozygous mutation, R207H (c.620G >A), was detected in five asthenozoospermic patients, while there was no detection of this genotype among the fertile candidates, indicating that the mutation was located within a conserved domain predicted by PolyPhen-2 analysis as "probably damaging" to the protein.
Conclusions: These results suggested that tektin-t variants (Arg/Cys + Cys/Cys) were probably one of the high risk genetic factors for idiopathic asthenozoospermia among males in Sichuan, China, while the R207H polymorphism may be associated with idiopathic asthenozoospermia risk.
Keywords: Asthenozoospermia; Genetic polymorphisms; Sperm motility; Tektin-t.