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Enhanced efficiency of sorting sperm motility utilizing a microfluidic chip

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Abstract

To demonstrate a highly efficient microfluidic system for motile sperm sorting, we designed a novel microfluidic device with three inlets and three outlets. Utilizing the different flow rate as a basic background, the characteristics of laminar flow that has three parallel flows within a microfluidic chip. In the main channel, only motile sperm can break through boundary layer from its original laminar flow, because motile sperm has a property of swim freely. Therefore, this mechanism can separate motile sperm from no motile sperm and other particles. Motile sperm from the upper and lower inlets in our device can break through the stream boundary to the collection reservoir. Through microscopic observation, fluorescent images of sperm with varied motility indicated that the laminar streams are similar to results from CFDRC simulation. To confirm the real sorting situation, we identified and quantified the proportions of living and dead sperm after sorting through flow cytometric analysis. We compared the reservoir sorting area and waste area to realize that efficiency is improved. The advantages of our device are including stable field, sample double processing and main channel designed gradually wider which is beneficial with increase sorting possibility. The result showed that sperm collected via our sorting device have greater activity as sperm motility.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by NTHU/CGMH collaboration funds (CMRPG30082, CMRPG380121 and CMRPG390441), and part of fund comes from National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 101-2221-E-007-099-MY3 and NSC 102-2120-M-002-009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Linkou Medical Center, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taoyuan City, Taiwan

    Hong-Yuan Huang

  2. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chang Gung University and College of Medicine, Taoyuan City, Taiwan

    Hong-Yuan Huang

  3. Department of Power Mechanical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, ROC

    Po-Wei Huang & Da-Jeng Yao

  4. Institute of Nanoengineering and Microsystems, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, ROC

    Da-Jeng Yao

Authors
  1. Hong-Yuan Huang
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  2. Po-Wei Huang
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  3. Da-Jeng Yao
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Correspondence to Da-Jeng Yao.

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Huang, HY., Huang, PW. & Yao, DJ. Enhanced efficiency of sorting sperm motility utilizing a microfluidic chip. Microsyst Technol 23, 305–312 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-015-2495-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-015-2495-6

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