Echinacoside Increases Sperm Quantity in Rats by Targeting the Hypothalamic Androgen Receptor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Male infertility is a major health issue with an estimated prevalence of 4.2% of male infertility worldwide. Our early work demonstrated that Cistanche extracts protect against sperm damage in mice and that echinacoside (ECH) is one of the major active components. Here we report an essential role for ECH, a natural product that reverses or protects against oligoasthenospermia in rats. ECH was assayed by HPLC, the quantity and quality of sperm was evaluated and hormone levels were determined by radioimmunosorbent assay. ECH reduced levels of androgen receptor (AR) and key steroidogenic-related genes as determined by Western blot and qPCR analysis. The interaction between ECH and AR were evaluated by indirect ELISA and molecular docking. The results show that ECH combined with hypothalamic AR in the pocket of Met-894 and Val-713 to inhibit transfer of AR from the cytoplasm to nuclei in the hypothalamus. While negative feedback of sex hormone regulation was inhibited, positive feedback was stimulated to increase the secretion of luteinizing hormone and testosterone subsequently enhancing the quantity of sperm. Taken together, these data demonstrate that ECH blocks AR activity in the hypothalamus to increase the quantity of sperm and protect against oligoasthenospermia in rats.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".