Chronic stress reduces spermatogenic cell proliferation in rat testis

Male reproductive dysfunction induced by mental stress and environmental factors has increased greatly in recent years. Previous studies of the male rat reproductive system under stress conditions evaluated changes in physiology and pathophysiology. However, no genome-wide study has been applied to such models. Here we studied the histopathologic changes in testes of rats under different durations of stress and used RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to investigate the testicular transcriptome and detect differentially expressed genes. Reverse transcription quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) and immunohistochemistry were used to verify these. Chronic stress resulted in significant histopathologic changes in seminiferous tubules and RNA-seq showed that growing numbers of genes were dysregulated with increasing stress exposure. Gene Ontology (GO) analysis showed that many biological processes of cell proliferation-associated terms were highly significantly enriched among downregulated genes, from chronically stressed groups. Proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) was used as a key marker of cell proliferation. RT-qPCR and immunohistochemistry indicated that PCNA mRNA and protein expression levels were greatly decreased with prolonged stress, thereby contributing to the attenuation of spermatogenic cell proliferation in the rat testis. This could provide a new scientific basis for the study of male reproductive dysfunction caused by stress.