Comparison of microfluidic and swim-up sperm separation methods for IVF

Sperm separation for ICSI is an essential step in realization of the IVF procedures. The method of microfluidic separation of sperm cells using chips has been applied more and more frequently in recent years. This method is often presented as extremely gentle to spermatozoa and decreasing significantly concentration of sperm cells with fragmented DNA when compared to conventional methods. The aim of our study was to verify a microfluidic chip system from the perspective of its potential to select spermatozoa with non-fragmented DNA. We tested the efficiency of this separation method against the swim-up method. In this study we evaluated sperm DNA integrity before and after the separation methods in ten patients. Ejaculate of each patient was separated by both the swim up method and the microfluidic chip method at the same time. It was shown that both the methods are very similar in reduction of spermatozoa with fragmented DNA. Interestingly, the concentration of spermatozoa with fragmented DNA was lower after the microfluidic separation than after the swim-up method in all the patients. Nevertheless, the differences were not statistically significant with only 2.1% on average, which is negligible in terms of practical use.

Running title: Microfluidic chip and DNA fragmentation