A segregating human allele of SPO11 modeled in mice disrupts timing and amounts of meiotic recombination, causing oligospermia and a decreased ovarian reserve†.

A major challenge in medical genetics is to characterize variants of unknown significance (VUS). Doing so would help delineate underlying causes of disease and the design of customized treatments. Infertility has presented an especially difficult challenge with respect to not only determining if a given patient has a genetic basis, but also to identify the causative genetic factor(s). Though genome sequencing can identify candidate variants, in silico predictions of causation are not always sufficiently reliable so as to be actionable. Thus, experimental validation is crucial. Here, we describe the phenotype of mice containing a non-synonymous (proline-to-threonine at position 306) change in Spo11, corresponding to human SNP rs185545661. SPO11 is a topoisomerase-like protein that is essential for meiosis because it induces DNA double stranded breaks (DSBs) that stimulate pairing and recombination of homologous chromosomes. Although both male and female Spo11P306T/P306T mice were fertile, they had reduced sperm and oocytes, respectively. Spermatocyte chromosomes exhibited synapsis defects (especially between the X and Y chromosomes), elevated apoptotic cells, persistent markers of DSBs, and most importantly, fewer Type 1 crossovers that causes some chromosomes to have none. Spo11P306T/- mice were sterile and made fewer meiotic DSBs than Spo11+/- animals, suggesting that the Spo11P306T allele is a hypomorph and likely is delayed in making sufficient DSBs in a timely fashion. If the consequences are recapitulated in humans, it would predict phenotypes of premature ovarian failure, reduced sperm counts, and possible increased number of aneuploid gametes. These results emphasize the importance of deep phenotyping in order to accurately assess the impact of VUSs in reproduction genes.

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