Metabolic Fingerprinting of Seminal Plasma from Non-obstructive Azoospermia Patients: Positive Versus Negative Sperm Retrieval

BACKGROUND: Non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) occurs in approximately 10% of infertile men. Retrieval of the spermatozoa from the testicle of NOA patients is an invasive approach. Seminal plasma is an excellent source for exploring to find the biomarkers for presence of spermatozoa in testicular tissue. The present discovery phase study aimed to use metabolic fingerprinting to detect spermatogenesis from seminal plasma in NOA patients as a non-invasive method. METHODS: In this study, 20 men with NOA were identified based on histological analysis who had their first testicular biopsy in 2015 at Avicenna Fertility Center, Tehran, Iran. They were divided into two groups, a positive testicular sperm extraction (TESE(+)) and a negative testicular sperm extraction (TESE(−)). Seminal plasma of NOA patients was collected before they underwent testicular sperm extraction (TESE) operation. The metabolomic fingerprinting was evaluated by Raman spectrometer. Principal component analysis (PCA) and an unsupervised statistical method, was used to detect outliers and find the structure of the data. The PCA was analyzed by MATLAB software. RESULTS: Metabolic fingerprinting of seminal plasma from NOA showed that TESE (+) versus TESE(−) patients were classified by PCA. Furthermore, a possible subdivision of TESE(−) group was observed. Additionally, TESE(−) patients were in extreme oxidative imbalance compared to TESE(+) patients. CONCLUSION: Metabolic fingerprinting of seminal plasma can be considered as a breakthrough, an easy and cheap method for prediction presence of spermatogenesis in NOA.