Sirt1 regulates testosterone biosynthesis in Leydig cells via modulating autophagy

• 作者: Muhammad Babar Khawar Chao Liu Fengyi Gao Hui Gao Wenwen Liu Tingting Han Lina Wang Guoping Li Hui Jiang Wei Li
• 来源期刊: 蛋白质与细胞
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（1）
• 所属期刊栏目: LETTERS
• 页码范围: 67-75
• 页数: 9页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Dear Editor, Steroid hormones are crucial signal molecules that regulate a large number of physiological and developmental pro-cesses.Testosterone is the key steroid hormone required for the development of male characteristics and also supports the physiology of the male reproductive system(Sinclair et al.,2015).Testosterone is primarily produced by the Leydig cells residing in the testicular interstitium.The cholesterol acts as a substrate for the biosynthesis of testosterone.Since steroidogenic cells are capable of stor-ing only very little hormone,rapid synthesis of hormone requires the mobilization of the precursor cholesterol,chiefly stored as intracellular lipid droplets(LDs)(Danielsen et al.,2016).Leydig cells are the major sites to produce testos-terone,there are extremely active autophagy in them,and a decline in steroidogenesis has also been associated with the decline of autophagic flow.Moreover,the disruption of autophagy leads to decreased intracellular LDs,and there-fore affects testosterone synthesis in the Leydig cells(Danielsen et al.,2016;Gao et al.,2018).