The validity and practicality of sperm capacitation in clinical application of laminar-flow-based microfluidic sperm sorting system

The obstructive oligospermia sperm contributed the major cause for male infertility. Therefore, sorting the sperm with higher fertility potential becomes the major clinical issue in Assisted Reproductive Technology. However, sperm sorting with traditional sorting device were limited by its ability in sperm quantitative calibrations in mobility as well as in concentration. Although, the staining results from our previous design confirmed that most motile sperm is able to leave the laminar stream and being sorted out at corresponding port from debris. In this study, in order to confirm its validity and practicality in the real sorting situation, the amount of sperm in collected sample was counted by flow cytometry and attempt was tried to establish a statistic model. From the combined result of flow cytometry and fluorescent stain, it is shown that live sperms were able to cross the laminar stream created by the device and reach the sorting chamber with corresponding range from non-motile sperms to debris, as well as from living to dead ones. However, proper dilution and adjustment is often needed, especially in sperm density and impurity to sperm ratio. It is therefore concluded that the proposed method is cost effective and is possible to serve as a protocol for rapid sperm quantitative assessment.