Fig. 4

Lack of AR SUMOylation alters epididymal gene expression and AR chromatin binding. a Heat map of known androgen-regulated genes clustered by unsupervised hierarchical clustering from RNA-seq data. b Relative expression of Spink5, Spink11 and Spink13 mRNA in 3-month-old WT and ArKI IS and Cap epididymides by RT-qPCR normalized to L19 and Ppia expression. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01. c Relative expression of Spink2, Spink4, Spink12 and Rhox5 mRNA in WT and ArKI IS and Cap epididymides by RT-qPCR normalized to L19 and Ppia expression. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01. d Relative expression of Spink2, Spink4 and Rhox5 mRNA in WT and ArKI testis by RT-qPCR. ***p < 0.001. In panels b–d n = 5 WT and 6 ArKI mice. Boxplot center lines indicate the median and the boxes extend to lower and upper quartiles with whiskers depicting maximum and minimum. p values were determined by two-tailed Student’s t test or by Mann−Whitney test. ND not detected. e Heat map showing AR ChIP-seq tag densities in WT and ArKI epididymis at WT AR-preferred, WT and ArKI-shared and ArKI-preferred AR chromatin-binding sites (ARBs) in a window ±4 kb (left panel). Comparison of the WT and the ArKI average tag counts ±500 bp from the centers of the ARBs in the three categories (right panel). AR: androgen receptor, WT: wild type