Abstract
Infertility is a highly debated topic today. It has been long hypothesized that infertility has an idiopathic cause, but recent studies demonstrated the existence of a genetic substrate. Fortunately, the methods of editing the human genome proven to be revolutionary. Following research conducted, we identified a total of 21 relevant studies; 14 were performed on mice, 5 on zebrafish and 2 on rats. We concluded that over forty-four genes in total are dispensable for fertility in both sexes without affecting host homeostasis. However, there are genes whose loss-of-function induces moderate to severe phenotypic changes in both sexes. There were situations in which the authors reported infertility, exhibited by the experimental model, or other pathologies such as cryptorchidism, cataracts, or reduced motor activity. Overall, zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/Cas9 are techniques that offer a wide range of possibilities for studying infertility, even to create mutant variants. It can be concluded that ZFNs, TALENs, and CRISPR/Cas9 are crucial tools in biomedical research.
Highlights
With provisions issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the English Oxford Dictionary, infertility can be defined as the impossibility to procreate, carry, or deliver a baby naturally after having been tried for at least one year [1]
The authors reported the role of forty-four genes: twenty-two are correlated to different pathologies such as primary ovarian failure (POF), ovarian dysgenesis (OD); seven concerning oocyte maturation defect (OOMD), preimplantation embryonic lethality (PREMBL), whereas five are attributed to recurrent pregnancy loss (RPRGL)
zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) constitutes the fusion of two artificial modular assemblies made up of three to six zinc-finger motifs found in proteins like transcriptional factors
Summary
With provisions issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the English Oxford Dictionary, infertility can be defined as the impossibility to procreate, carry, or deliver a baby naturally after having been tried for at least one year [1]. Papler et al [5] aimed to assess the in vitro fertilization (IVF) parameters and gene expression of progesterone receptor (PGR) and tumor necrosis factor-inducible gene 14 protein (PTX3) in cumulus cells (CCs) of obese and normal weighting women. ZFN and TALEN require a complex design for every different sequence target, and besides, there are several limitations in the creation of the full construct (plasmid and specific active nucleases), which renders these two editing tools quite expensive. In contrast with ZFN and TALEN, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/Cas9 [10] remains the most powerful gene-editing tool since its emergence nine years ago. This system is based on two crucial components: Cas protein and guide. The present manuscript aims to highlight the main features and the associated results obtained through all these genome editing methods to study or even treating infertility in distinct experimental models
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