Male factor infertility is involved in almost half of all infertile couples. Lack of the ejaculated sperm due to testicular malfunction has been reported in 6-10% of infertile, a condition named non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA). In this study, we investigated untargeted metabolomic profiling of the seminal plasma in NOA men using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and advance chemometrics. In this regard, the seminal plasma fluids of 11 NOA men with TESE-negative (AZN), 9 NOA men with TESE-positive (AZP) and 10 fertile (F) healthy men (as a control group) were collected. Quadratic discriminate analysis (QDA) technique was implemented on total ion chromatograms (TICs) for identification of discriminatory retention times. We developed multivariate classification models using the QDA technique. Our results clearly revealed that the developed QDA models could predict the classes of samples using their TIC data. The receiver operating characteristic curves for these models were more than 0.88. After recognition of discriminatory retention time's asymmetric penalized least square, evolving factor analysis, correlation optimized warping and alternating least squares strategies have been applied for preprocessing and deconvolution of the overlapped chromatographic peaks. Here, we could identify thirty six discriminatory metabolites. These metabolites may be considered discriminatory biomarkers for different groups in NOA.
Biomedical chromatography : BMC. 2017 Jan 06 [Epub ahead of print]
Kambiz Gilany, Ahmad Mani-Varnosfaderani, Arash Minai-Tehrani, Fateme Mirzajani, Alireza Ghassempour, Mohammed Reza Sadeghi, Mehdi Amini, Hassan Rezadoost
Reproductive Biotechnology Research Center, Avicenna Research Institute, ACECR, Tehran, Iran., Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, Chemometrics Laboratory, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran., Nanobiotechnology Research Center, Avicenna Research Institute, ACECR, Tehran, Iran., Department of Biotechnology, The Faculty of Renewable Emergies & New Technologies, Tehran, Iran., Department of Phytochemistry, Medicinal Plants and Drugs Research Institute, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.