Abstract
Male infertility is a reproductive disease, and existing clinical solutions for this condition often involve long and cumbersome sperm sorting methods, including preprocessing and centrifugation‐based steps. These methods also fall short when sorting for sperm free of reactive oxygen species, DNA damage, and epigenetic aberrations. Although several microfluidic platforms exist, they suffer from structural complexities, i.e., pumps or chemoattractants, setting insurmountable barriers to clinical adoption. Inspired by the natural filter‐like capabilities of the female reproductive tract for sperm selection, a model‐driven design, featuring pillar arrays that efficiently and noninvasively isolate highly motile and morphologically normal sperm, with lower epigenetic global methylation, from raw semen, is presented. The Simple Periodic ARray for Trapping And isolatioN (SPARTAN) created here modulates the directional persistence of sperm, increasing the spatial separation between progressive and nonprogressive motile sperm populations within an unprecedentedly short 10 min assay time. With over 99% motility of sorted sperm, a 5‐fold improvement in morphology, 3‐fold increase in nuclear maturity, and 2–4‐fold enhancement in DNA integrity, SPARTAN offers to standardize sperm selection while eliminating operator‐to‐operator variations, centrifugation, and flow. SPARTAN can also be applied in other areas, including conservation ecology, breeding of farm animals, and design of flagellar microrobots for diagnostics.
Highlights
Human infertility affects an estimated 15% of couples globally, and nearly one-third of these infertility cases are of male origin.[1]
The initial simulation results from the coarse-grained multiparticle collision dynamics (MPCD) model revealed a wide variety of motility behavior for sperm traversing the pillar array, with the anisotropy of pillar spacing influencing the swimming direction (Figure 1e,f; Figure S1, Supporting Information)
When pillars were spaced appropriately, sperm with morphological defects were effectively constrained due to their abnormal motility characteristics and were unable to traverse the channel effectively (Figure 1g). To quantitatively model this rather diverse and unexpected behavior at large time and length scales, we developed a multiscale model of sperm motility for the Simple Periodic ARray for Trapping And isolatioN (SPARTAN) featuring microfluidic channels (Experimental Section and Supporting Information)
Summary
Human infertility affects an estimated 15% of couples globally (about 50 million total), and nearly one-third of these infertility cases are of male origin.[1]. Long periods of incubation, as well as shear stresses due to centrifugation, increase ROS
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