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Research Paper|Volume 8, Issue 1|pp 95—110

Alterations in oxidative, inflammatory and apoptotic events in short-lived and long-lived mice testes

María Eugenia Matzkin1,2, Johanna Gabriela Miquet3, Yimin Fang4, Cristal Monique Hill4,5, Daniel Turyn3, Ricardo Saúl Calandra1, Andrzej Bartke4, Mónica Beatriz Frungieri1,2
  • 1Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental, CONICET, Vuelta de Obligado 2 Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • 2Cátedra de Bioquímica Humana, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • 3Departamento de Química Biológica, Instituto de Química y Fisicoquímica Biológicas, Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • 4Geriatrics Research, Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University, Springfield, IL 62794, USA
  • 5Department of Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Cell Biology, School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University, Springfield, IL 62794, USA
Received: October 12, 2015Accepted: January 17, 2016Published: January 23, 2016
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.100875

Copyright: © 2016 Matzkin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Aged testes undergo profound histological and morphological alterations leading to a reduced functionality. Here, we investigated whether variations in longevity affect the development of local inflammatory processes, the oxidative state and the occurrence of apoptotic events in the testis. To this aim, well-established mouse models with delayed (growth hormone releasing hormone-knockout and Ames dwarf mice) or accelerated (growth hormone-transgenic mice) aging were used.

We hereby show that the testes of short-lived mice show a significant increase in cyclooxygenase 2 expression, PGD2 production, lipid peroxidation, antioxidant enzymes expression, local macrophages and TUNEL-positive germ cells numbers, and the levels of both pro-caspase-3 and cleaved caspase-3. In contrast, although the expression of antioxidant enzymes remained unchanged in testes of long-lived mice, the remainder of the parameters assessed showed a significant reduction.

This study provides novel evidence that longevity confers anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant and anti-apoptotic capacities to the adult testis. Oppositely, short-lived mice suffer testicular inflammatory, oxidative and apoptotic processes.