Hemicastration is a unilateral orchiectomy to remove a testis injured by external force, biochemistry or illness.
Nevertheless, whether hemicastration affects steroid hormone biosynthesis or induces DNA methylation changes in the remaining testis is unknown.
We found that hemicastration caused differential expression of a number of genes involved in spermatogenesis and prostaglandin biosynthesis, and that these genes were partially regulated by DNA methylation.
Male KM mice were randomly divided into control (n = 19) and hemicastration (n = 19) groups after weaning (age 24 days), and were housed and maintained on a 12 h:12 h light:dark cycle, with free access to standard chow and water.
Because of the high consistency among individuals within each group, we randomly chose 3 biological replicates out of each group to represent the control and hemicastration for RRBS, of which two were used for RNA-seq.
DEseq2 (part of the R package) was used to detect genes in the testis that were differentially expressed between the control and hemicastration groups.