Various Inflammatory Response of Fallopian Tube Epithelial Cells to Sperms with DNA Fragmentation

Background: The fallopian tubes have important role to pre-pare a safe environment for fertilization. In addition, they have different functions such as sperm saving, capacitation and so on. The interaction between the male and female gametes and embryos in the female reproductive system plays an important role in fertility, embryonic development, and implantation. The immune system in reproductive tract has different chal-lenges such as overcoming infections and chronic inflamma-tory conditions as well as being able to tolerate the allogeneic spermatozoa. Cytokines are one of the most important variables of immune cells that provide effective host protection. During fertilization sperms carry proteins which are allogenic to the female immune system. Therefore, cytokines play an important role in the fallopian tube specially in the presence of sperm. In current study we investigated the expression of anti-inflamma-tory cytokines by fallopian tube under the effect of sperms with and without DNA fragmentation.Materials and Methods: Fallopian tube epithelial cells were cultured into the tissue culture flasks containing DMEM/F12 with 10% FBS medium. During cell preparation, sperm sam-ples from 20 donors which were normal according to WHO cri-teria were collected. The extent of sperm DNA fragmentation was measured by the TUNEL assay. Afterward, samples divid-ed to two groups of normal and abnormal DFI, and the cell lines without sperm classified as control group. Different sperms were co-incubated with fallopian tube cells for 24h. RNA ex-traction from cells was done fallowed by cDNA synthetized. Finally, PCR array was performed to evaluate cytokine expres-sion profiling. In addition, this data was validated by q-PCR. Results: The data analysis indicated that the expression of anti-inflammatory cytokines in the presence of sperm significantly changes. Sperm DFI is also effective in expressing of some cytokines and the results showed various expression of them in different groups. Anti-inflammatory cytokines including TGFB2, IL11 and IL13 had lower expression in sperm group than the control. However, other cytokines like IL2, IL12A, IL22 and IL24 were upregulated in response to sperms with abnormal DFI and they were down-regulated in response to normal sperms.Conclusion: This study point that abnormal DFI can change the expression of cytokines which have essential roles in sperm preservation and fertilization. Therefore, the abnormal sperm seems to be suppressed by the immune system of fallopian tube.

کلیدواژه ها:

Inflammatory Response ، DNA Fragmentation ، Fal-lopian Tube ، Sperm