Single-nucleotide polymorphisms in HORMAD1 may be a risk factor for azoospermia caused by meiotic arrest in Japanese patients.

Genetic mechanisms are implicated as a cause of some male infertility, yet are poorly understood. Meiosis is unique to germ cells and essential for reproduction. The synaptonemal complex is a critical component for chromosome pairing, segregation and recombination. Hormad1 is essential for mammalian gametogenesis as knockout male mice are infertile. Hormad1-deficient testes exhibit meiotic arrest in the early pachytene stage and synaptonemal complexes cannot be visualized. To analyze the hypothesis that the human HORMAD1 gene defects are associated with human azoospermia caused by meiotic arrest, mutational analysis was performed in all coding regions by direct sequence analysis of 30 Japanese men diagnosed with azoospermia resulting from meiotic arrest. By the sequence analysis, three polymorphism sites, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism 1 (c. 163A>G), SNP2 (c. 501T>G) and SNP3 (c. 918C>T), were found in exons 3, 8 and 10. The 30 patients with azoospermia and 80 normal pregnancy-proven, fertile men were analyzed for HORMAD1 polymorphisms. Both SNP1 and SNP2 were associated with human azoospermia caused by complete early meiotic arrest (P<0.05). We suggest that the HORMAD1 has an essential meiotic function in human spermatogenesis.