MEMS Lab, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Sci Rep. 2024 Nov 4;14(1):26717. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-78536-7.
The increasing infertility rate has become a worrying global challenge in recent years. According to the report of the World Health Organization, the male factor is responsible for over half of infertility cases, which includes the lack of desirable characteristics in sperm motility, morphology, and DNA integrity. In recent years, it has been shown that clinical methods including density gradient centrifugation cause damage to sperm DNA and besides being invasive, they are costly and time-consuming. In contrast, microfluidics has been used as a promising and non-invasive approach to manipulate biological cells. Here, by using the microvortices created by the oscillation of the bubbles caused by the bulk acoustic waves, we were able to trap sperms with less motility. In contrast, the highly motile sperms overcame the force of the microvortices and were guided to the outlet pool by following the channel boundaries. As a result, over 50% and 44% improvement in sperm progressive motility and viability, respectively, as well as 40% improvement in DNA integrity, were observed in the analysis of sperms retrieved from the output pool. In addition to being fast and non-invasive, the proposed device benefits from an easy method for sperms retrieval and does not require any preprocessing of the raw sperm sample.
近年来，不断上升的不孕率已成为一个令人担忧的全球性挑战。根据世界卫生组织的报告，男性因素导致了超过一半的不孕病例，其中包括精子运动能力、形态和 DNA 完整性方面缺乏理想特征。近年来，已有研究表明，包括密度梯度离心在内的临床方法会对精子 DNA 造成损伤，而且这些方法具有侵入性、成本高且耗时。相比之下，微流控技术已被用作一种有前途的非侵入性方法来操纵生物细胞。在这里，我们利用由体声波引起的气泡振动产生的微涡旋，成功捕获了运动能力较弱的精子。相比之下，高运动能力的精子克服了微涡旋的力，沿着通道边界被引导至出口池。结果，从输出池中取出的精子分析显示，精子的前向运动能力和活力分别提高了 50%和 44%，DNA 完整性提高了 40%。除了快速和非侵入性之外，所提出的设备还受益于一种简便的精子回收方法，并且不需要对原始精子样本进行任何预处理。
