Abstract
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) plays a critical role in oocyte maturation, fertilization, and early embryonic development. Defects in mtDNA may determine the alteration of the mitochondrial function, affecting cellular oxidative phosphorylation and ATP supply, leading to impaired oocyte maturation, abnormal fertilization, and low embryonic developmental potential, ultimately leading to female infertility. This case–control study was established to investigate the correlation between mtDNA variations and early embryonic development defects. Peripheral blood was collected for next-generation sequencing from women who suffered the repeated failures of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and/or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) cycles due to early embryonic development defects as well as in-house healthy controls, and the sequencing results were statistically analyzed for all subjects. This study found that infertile women with early embryonic development defects carried more mtDNA variants, especially in the d-loop region, ATP6 gene, and CYTB gene. By univariate logistic regression analysis, 16 mtDNA variants were associated with an increased risk of early embryonic development defects (OR > 1, p < 0.05). Furthermore, we identified 16 potentially pathogenic mtDNA variants only in infertile cases. The data proved that mtDNA variations were associated with early embryonic development defects in infertile Chinese women.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC2700400, 2018YFC1004303), the Basic Science Center Program of NSFC (31988101), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82192874, 31871509, 82071606), Shandong Provincial Key Research and Development Program (2020ZLYS02), Research Unit of Gametogenesis and Health of ART-Offspring, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (2020RU001), the Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province (ts20190988) and the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. HZ: study design. YL and SZ: writing—original draft. YB and XC: writing—review & editing. YC and PX: Sample collection. CZ and JZ: clinical data collection. SZ: methodology. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Liu, Y., Zhao, S., Chen, X. et al. Variations in mitochondrial DNA coding and d-loop region are associated with early embryonic development defects in infertile women. Hum Genet 142, 193–200 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-022-02505-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-022-02505-1