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. 2022 Dec 3;164(2):bqac202. doi: 10.1210/endocr/bqac202

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© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Endocrine Society.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Figure 1. — Spermatogenic cell differentiation and stages of the mouse seminiferous epithelial cycle. A spermatogonium that enters spermatogenesis has to pass through all the depicted developmental phases (from left to right, bottom to top) plus 6 mitotic and 2 meiotic divisions to be released as mature elongated spermatids. As spermatogenesis proceeds, spermatogenic cells move from the basal towards the luminal compartment. The progress of 4 to 5 generations of spermatogenic cells (in rows) is synchronized, and certain spermatids (highlighted with red, gray, and purple) are always associated with particular types of spermatocytes (green and yellow) and spermatogonia (orange); these are the 12 (I-XII; columns) stages of the seminiferous epithelial cycle. Spermatogonia (Spg; orange) exist as type A-undifferentiated plus A1 to A4, Intermediate (In) and type B. Primary spermatocytes can be divided into prepachytene (Spc-prePach; yellow, including preleptotene, Pl; leptotene, L; zygotene, Z), and pachytene (Spc-Pach; green) (pachytene, P; plus diplotene, D) spermatocytes. Meiotic divisions (m2m; cyan) and secondary spermatocytes (Spc-sec, 2^o; olive) can be found solely in stage XII. Postmeiotic germ cell differentiation, that is, spermiogenesis, can be further divided into 16 steps (1-16); encompassing round spermatids (RS; red), and 2 categories of elongating spermatids: early (elSpt-early; gray) and late (elSpt-late; purple). Sertoli cells (Sert; blue).