Influence of bioactive compounds present in white tea in Sertoli Cells oxidative and metabolic profiles

The tea is the second most popular drink in the world and is prepared by infusing of the leaves and/or the buds of the specie Camellia sinensis (L.). Tea is divided in four types: green, black, oolong and white. From those, the white tea (WTEA) remains as the less studied though previous reports from our team showed that it may have more biological activity when compared to the popular green tea. Based on the processing, WTEA can be classified as: Bai Hao Yin Zhen (BHYZ), Bai Mu Dan (BMD), Gong Mei (GM) and Shou Mei (SM). These WTEA differ in quality, flavor and performance being that BMD and BHYZ are the most consumed types grades on the Asian continent. Energy metabolism is a key for spermatogenesis, the process of spermatozoa production. Anaerobic glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation, which takes place in the mitochondria, are the main metabolic pathways involved in ATP production. However, during those processes, several cellular sources produce significant amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS overproduction results in oxidative stress (OS), which is related with several problems that may end up in male subfertility or infertility. Herein we proposed to study how WTEA aqueous extracts of subtypes BMD and BHYZ may influence the nutritional support of spermatogenesis. Firstly, we exposed the cells responsible for that function, human Sertoli cells (hSC), to increasing concentrations of WTEA extracts subtypes BMD and BHYZ (in mg/mL: 0.05; 0.5 and 5) to evaluate cytotoxicity by measuring metabolic activity (MTT assay) and growth (SRB assay). Only the exposure to 5 mg/mL of WTEA extract subtype BMD induced cytotoxicity to hSC. Therefore, we selected to expose hSC to 0.5 mg/mL of WTEA extracts subtypes BMD and BHYZ during 24h. Media and cells were collected for metabolism study using 1H-NMR, complemented with LDH activity and mRNA and protein quantification of metabolism-related enzymes and transporters. We also determined protein carbonylation and DNA mitochondrial copy number in hSC. Our data shows ...