We Can Now Use High-Quality Sperm Only By Separating Them From Semen

Researchers have combined fluid dynamics with acoustic waves to envisage a new approach to the reproduction of humans by isolating high-quality sperm from others to help infertile couples in building their families. The research results were published in a recent study.

The new rapid, automated acoustofluidic process is developed by a team of researchers from the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Monash University. They isolated sperms that have high-quality DNA integrity from normal head morphology from raw semen samples.

With the new device, the researchers could process about 140 sperms a second and pick out over 60,000 high-quality sperms in under 50 minutes. This is a large number of sperms to use for In Vitro Fertilization and Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection.

The research is lead by Junyang Gai, a second-year doctoral student, who shared that:

“The approach isolates sperm from raw semen by applying an acoustic field at a 30° angle to the flow direction. The acoustic forces direct and push high-quality sperm out of the mainstream, across the microchannel and isolates them in a sperate outlet, leaving the general population of sperm in the raw sample.”

To apply SSAW (standing-surface acoustic waves) at 19.28 MHz and 1-2 watts, the researchers created an acoustic radiation force that was significant enough to overcome the fluidic drag as well as guide motile sperms across the microchannel width. As a result, other sperms and debris are left to flow down the mainstream, collected through a discard outlet.

This way, the researchers achieved a continuous, size-variant, high-throughput selection process to isolate high-quality sperms. Gai added:

“Our results demonstrate that the selected sperm population exhibit a considerably higher percentage of progressively motile sperm (83%), than both the initial raw sample (52%) and the discarded subpopulation of sperm (36%).”

The research team has achieved an improvement of over 60% in progressive motility, the sperm’s capacity to swim forward with its own power. At the same time, the new approach also offers a clinically-significant sample for ICSI and IVF procedures. Sperms chosen using this method proves nearly 40% of improvement in DNA integrity.

The research supervisor Reza Nosrati said:

“Sperm preparation or selection is a key step in assisted reproduction being performed right before fertilizing the egg. The current clinical process involves multiple washing and centrifugation steps and a manual selection step, and takes up to three hours to complete, which can also be harmful to sperm.”

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