Publications by authors named "Irina D Mekina"
Predicting the clinical outcomes of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) cycles that use the testicular spermatozoa of azoospermic patients presents a challenge. Thus, the development of additional approaches to assessing the competence of a testicular-sperm-derived embryo without causing damage to gametes or the embryo is necessary. One of the key parameters in determining such developmental competence is telomere length (TL).
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- The study investigates how telomere length (TL) affects human lifespan, focusing on its determination in triploid zygotes from both maternal and paternal chromosomes.
- Using Q-FISH, researchers analyzed TL in 28 human triploid zygotes, finding that paternal chromosomes exhibited longer mean relative TLs compared to maternal ones, indicating a possible "imprinting" effect.
- Despite the differences in TL based on parental origin, age or quality of sperm did not influence TL, highlighting the importance of heredity over environmental factors in determining TL in zygotes.
We studied the impact of age and the serum anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH)/follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) levels on the number of cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) retrieved from female reciprocal and Robertsonian translocation carriers after controlled ovarian hyperstimulation (COH). The number of COCs retrieved after COH was retrospectively analyzed in female translocation carriers and 46,XX partners of male translocation carriers from 100 couples. The median number of COCs varied from nine to 16 and did not differ among subgroups of women categorized by age, presence and type of a translocation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report on the phenotype and the reproductive history of an adult female patient with an unbalanced karyotype: 8p23 and 18p11.3 terminal deletions and 8p22 duplication. The indication for karyotyping of the 28-year-old patient was a structural rearrangement in her miscarriage specimen: 45,ХХ,der(8;18)t(8;18)(p23;p11.
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- The study analyzed DNA hydroxymethylation and methylation in human testicular cells and sperm from azoospermic patients and sperm donors, finding that while methylation was consistent throughout spermatogenesis, hydroxymethylation varied and was mostly low in sperm samples.
- High levels of hydroxymethylcytosine were primarily found in a small population of sperm cells, indicating that variations in hydroxymethylation patterns are likely not genetically programmed but may indicate abnormalities.
- Increased levels of hydroxymethylated sperm correlated negatively with markers of good semen quality and positively with sperm DNA fragmentation, suggesting that hydroxymethylation could serve as a new indicator for assessing sperm quality in infertile couples.