Male infertility is an important issue affecting reproductive health, and its etiology and mechanism are complex or not clear. For patients with azoospermia, specific clinical treatments are limited. Therefore, to generate patients' own functional sperms is absolutely necessary. With the development of techniques, the scientists start to think about how to attain functional sperms deriving from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in vitro. Mainly, sperm induction with iPSCs includes two steps, first, the formation of diploid primordial germ cell, then the differentiation of haploid mature sperms. Technically, the difficulties lie in the generation of meiosis from a diploid cell into haploid sperm, and unfortunately, the problem is not solved yet. In order to understand this kind of knowledge well, we try to review the technical progress and principle of male gamete induction from iPSCs. Hopefully, it can help us to understand the mechanism of spermatogenesis in vitro well, and to provide a reference for the clinical application ofin vitro fertilization.

Pluripotent stem cells; Male germ cells; Spermatogenesis; Differentiationin vitro