Gene Expression in the Epididymis of Normal and Vasectomized Men: What Can We Learn About Human Sperm Maturation?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anatomically, the human epididymis is unusual when compared with the excurrent duct of other eutherian mammals. Furthermore, clinical observations suggest that it may not be as important for sperm maturation as is the case for laboratory animals. In contrast, hierarchical clustering of microarray data of epididymides from normal men revealed 2274 modulated qualifiers between the epididymal segments, 1184, 713, and 269 of them being highly expressed in the caput, corpus, and cauda, respectively. The organization of qualifiers according to their similarities by gene ontology indicated that caput transcripts are dedicated to cell-cell adhesion, whereas the corpus is characterized by genes involved in response to other organisms (ie, defense mechanisms) and the cauda transcriptome is specialized in muscle contraction and establishment of localization. A region-specific gene expression pattern thus characterizes the human epididymis as in animal models. In humans, vasectomies have consequences on the epididymal transcriptome. Cluster analysis revealed that 1363 genes are expressed in both normal and vasectomized epididymides, whereas 911 and 660 of them are specifically expressed in normal and vasectomized epididymides, respectively. Three of the affected genes are particularly interesting because of their involvement in sperm biochemical remodeling during epididymal transit: dicarbonyl/l-xylulose reductase, Niemann-Pick disease, type C2, and cysteine-rich secretory protein 1. In some vasovasostomized men, these modifications in gene expression induced by vasectomy are irreversible, thus affecting the biochemical parameters, and potentially, the function of their ejaculated sperm. This may explain the discrepancies between a surgically successful vasovasostomy and fertility recovery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".