文摘
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.
