Journal
LAB ON A CHIP
Volume 14, Issue 6, Pages 1142-1150Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c3lc51254a
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Funding
- Collaborative Health Research Project Grant
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
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Sperm selection is essential to assisted reproductive technology (ART), influencing treatment outcomes and the health of offspring. The fundamental challenge of sperm selection is dictated by biology: a heterogeneous population of similar to 10(8) sperm per milliliter with a short lifetime in vitro. However, conventional sperm selection approaches result in less than 50% improvement in DNA integrity. Here, a clinically applicable microfluidic device is presented that selects sperm based on the progressive motility in 500 parallel microchannels. The result is a one-step procedure for semen purification and high DNA integrity sperm selection from 1 mL of raw semen in under 20 minutes. Experiments with bull sperm indicate more than 89% improvement in selected sperm vitality. Clinical tests with human sperm show more than 80% improvement in human DNA integrity, significantly outperforming the best current practices. These results demonstrate the presence of a sub-population of sperm with nearly intact chromatin and DNA integrity, and a simple clinically-applicable lab-on-a-chip method to select this population.
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