Human sperm Interactome: a first step toward the personalized male Reproductive Medicine.

Despite the continuously growing effort of researchers, often the most common diagnostic and therapeutic approaches are not effective in treating male infertility. This, in one hand, causes the worsening of living conditions and of physical and psychological wellness of several couples and, in the other one, it determines the healthcare costs rising. The personalised medicine could address these challenges, by characterizing individuals’ phenotypes and genotypes. As a first step toward the adoption of a personalized medicine-based approach in the study of male infertility, we have realized a network that describes the Human Spermatozoa Interactome (HSI), by adopting Python scripting and biological networks-based approach. As data source, we used Pathway Commons and Reactome databases. All the networks have been realized, visualized, and analysed with Cytoscape 3.2.0. The analysis of HSI network topology, pointing out a scale-free and ultra-small world architecture, has led to infer important characteristics of the biological system:  the network is robust against random failure;  the low value of clustering coefficient, together with the values of averaged number of neighbours and of characteristic path length suggests that the messages will spread within the networks quickly and efficiently;  it is possible to identify the nodes that shows a higher level of control within the networks, i.e. the most connected and central ones. This work could represent a first step to identify potential diagnostic markers and to concur in explaining “idiopathic infertility” of male origin with tailor-made prevention and treatment strategies.