Qurat Ul Ain Reshi ​

Junior Research Fellow, Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia

Qurat Ul Ain Reshi pursued her B.Sc in Zoology & Industrial Chemistry and M.Sc in Clinical biochemistry from University of Kashmir, India. Later she did her Master´s dissertation in Special Centre of Molecular Medicine (SCMM), Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India where she worked on DNA replication machinery of Plasmodium falciparum.
In 2018, she joined the Department of Pathophysiology, University of Tartu and started her PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Alireza Fazeli. In Tartu, she is working in a developmental biology lab where she aims to understand the role of extracellular vesicles in interactions between spermatozoa and oviductal epithelial cells in cattle.

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Spermatozoa, acts as an external cue and alters the cargo and production of

the extracellular vesicles derived from oviductal epithelial cell

The oviduct provides optimum physiological and biochemical milieu essential for successful fertilization as well as early embryo development and facilitates functional maturation of spermatozoa. Studies have showed that spermatozoa have the capability to alter gene expression in bovine oviductal epithelial cells (BOECs) remotely via secreted bio-active particles, thus acting as a cue to the oviduct prior to their arrival. However, very little attention has been ​paid to the question of whether spermatozoa could alter the cargo of extracellular vesicles (EV) derived from BOECs. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the alterations in small non-coding RNAs in EV cargo derived from BOECs when these BOECs were incubated with spermatozoa in contact and non-contact co-culture models. After 4 hours of incubation the EVs were purified from the conditioned media, followed by small non-coding sequencing of the BOEC derived EVs. Our results revealed a distinct cargo in the form of mRNA, miRNA, tRNA and piRNA, present in EVs purified from contact and non-contact co-culture models when compared to the control. The pathway enrichment analysis revealed that EV mRNA from direct co-culture was associated with genes that were involved in the activation of multi-vesicular body (MVB) and microtubule pathways. Similarly, the EV mRNA derived from non-contact conditioned media, the genes were associated with suppression of immune system. Moreover, miR-100 and miR-99a-5p were found to be upregulated in contact co-culture models, the target genes of which regulate the phosphatidylinositol signaling system. The findings of this study suggest that spermatozoa, in contact as well as remotely, alter the EV cargos of female reproductive tract epithelial cells which might be playing an essential role in pre and post-fertilization events. These cellular events including inter-cellular communication via EVs are essential for a healthy pregnancy to occur.