Surface functionalization of poly(dimethylsiloxane) substrates facilitates culture of pre-implantation mouse embryos by blocking non-selective adsorption.

Poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) is widely used in biomedical settings such as microfluidics for its optical transparency, castability, gas permeability and relative biocompatibility. While PDMS devices with certain modifications or treatments have been used for mammalian pre-implantation embryo culture, it is unclear why native PDMS leads to significant embryo death. In this study, we employ Nile Red as a model hydrophobic small molecule to demonstrate that significant hydrophobic sequestration occurs on native PDMS substrates even with a bovine serum albumin-containing KSOM pre-equilibration. Our results suggest that this small molecule sequestration has detrimental effects on mouse embryo development in PDMS static culture wells, with 0% blastocyst development rates from embryos cultured on native PDMS. We found that prior saturation of the PDMS culture well with water vapour only rescues about 10% of blastocyst development rates, indicating osmolality alone is not responsible for the high rates of embryo arrest. We also present a safe and simple Pluronic F127 pretreatment for PDMS substrates that successfully circumvented the harmful effects of native PDMS, achieving a blastocyst and implantation rate akin to that of our polystyrene controls. Our results call into question how researchers and clinicians can account for the alterations in medium composition and embryo secretions when using hydrophobic substrates, especially in the mammalian embryo culture setting where minimum effective concentrations of peptides and amino acids are commonplace.