Journal of Advanced Biomedical Sciences

Background & objective: Male infertility is a multifactorial disease resulting from the interaction between the genetic and environmental factors. Despite the methodological advancements, the possible causes of infertility are still unknown for more than 25 percent of cases. Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are the molecular chaperones that are involved in different developmental stages of spermatogenesis. The current study was planned to investigate the role of HSPA1L rs2227956 gene polymorphism in the idiopathic infertility in males.

Material & methods: This case control study was conducted on 342 subjects consisted of 143 patients with idiopathic male infertility and 199 control subjects. Followed by the DNA extraction from the peripheral blood, genotype determination was done by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism method. The logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the association between the polymorphism and male infertility.

Results: A significant difference was observed in the genotype distributions between the cases and controls. The results showed that the individuals with TC and CC genotype had an increased risk of male infertility. In addition, there was a significant association between C allele and male infertility.

Conclusion: HSPA1L rs2227956 polymorphism is associated with the idiopathic male infertility risk