Optoelectronic tweezers are able to distinguish between live and dead sperm cells, even if they aren’t moving, say US scientists.
An important part of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) techniques is selecting and injecting an individual sperm cell into an egg. The quality of the chosen sperm is critical to the success of the procedure and is currently assessed by an operator looking at sperm movement under a microscope. However, sperm that don’t move are not necessarily dead, and it is nearly impossible to assess their viability visually.
To combat this problem, Aaron Ohta at the University of Hawaii and his team have demonstrated that optoelectronic tweezers – which use a combination of light and electric fields to control microscopic objects – can distinguish and sort between live and dead cells, irrespective of mobility.
Link to journal article
Motile and non-motile sperm diagnostic manipulation using optoelectronic tweezers
Aaron T. Ohta, Maurice Garcia, Justin K. Valley, Lia Banie, Hsan-Yin Hsu, Arash Jamshidi, Steven L. Neale, Tom Lue and Ming C. Wu, Lab Chip, 2010, DOI: 10.1039/c0lc00072h
