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Selection of Functional Human Sperm with Higher DNA Integrity and Fewer Reactive Oxygen Species
Author(s) -
Asghar Waseem,
Velasco Vanessa,
Kingsley James L.,
Shoukat Muhammad S.,
Shafiee Hadi,
Anchan Raymond M.,
Mutter George L.,
Tüzel Erkan,
Demirci Utkan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
advanced healthcare materials
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.288
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 2192-2659
pISSN - 2192-2640
DOI - 10.1002/adhm.201400058
Subject(s) - sperm , dna fragmentation , semen , human fertilization , andrology , biology , in vitro fertilisation , reactive oxygen species , dna , microbiology and biotechnology , genetics , embryo , medicine , apoptosis , programmed cell death
Fertilization and reproduction are central to the survival and propagation of a species. Couples who cannot reproduce naturally have to undergo in vitro clinical procedures. An integral part of these clinical procedures includes isolation of healthy sperm from raw semen. Existing sperm sorting methods are not efficient and isolate sperm having high DNA fragmentation and reactive oxygen species (ROS), and suffer from multiple manual steps and variations between operators. Inspired by in vivo natural sperm sorting mechanisms where vaginal mucus becomes less viscous to form microchannels to guide sperm towards egg, a chip is presented that efficiently sorts healthy, motile and morphologically normal sperm without centrifugation. Higher percentage of sorted sperm show significantly lesser ROS and DNA fragmentation than the conventional swim‐up method. The presented chip is an easy‐to‐use high‐throughput sperm sorter that provides standardized sperm sorting assay with less reliance on operators's skills, facilitating reliable operational steps.