COMPLEXIN GENE AND MALE INFERTILITY

Infertility is the failure to have offspring after one year of regular unprotected intercourse. Acrosomal exocytosis is a prerequisite for successful fertilization and it involves numerous proteins. Complexin genes play an essential role in a controlled secretion of acrosome content. The objective of the present study was to determine the expression of the complexin gene in healthy and infertile male spermatozoa by using Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction. The demographic parameters like age, semen volume, sperm count, motility and immotile sperm were analyzed. There was no significant difference in the age and semen volume between normal and infertile groups. A significant difference was observed when the sperm count (p< 0.0000008) and motility (p<0.00000001) were compared between the groups.  RT-PCR data analysis showed a fold change difference of 0.0433. From this fold change difference, we determine that our gene of interest is downregulated and the student’s t-test was also applied which also showed that there is downregulation of the complexin gene in infertile men. The difference observed in analyzed data indicates that there is a significant role of the complexin gene in male infertility and their expression was inversely proportional to each other in normal and infertile males and complexin is surely playing a major role in male infertility. However, it is highly recommended that future studies investigate the cause of the down-regulation of the complexin gene as it plays an important role in the exocytosis of sperm nuclei.