Mini-Review Regarding the Applicability of Genome Editing Techniques Developed for Studying Infertility.
Ovidiu Dumitru IlieOvidiu-Dumitru IlieMaria PuiuAlin CiobicaCiprian IleaPublished in: Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) (2021)
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.
Keyphrases
- crispr cas
- genome editing
- genome wide
- polycystic ovary syndrome
- copy number
- transcription factor
- dna methylation
- early onset
- gene expression
- case control
- regulatory t cells
- insulin resistance
- metabolic syndrome
- bioinformatics analysis
- genome wide identification
- high intensity
- adipose tissue
- young adults
- skeletal muscle