Changed habits and lifestyles (alcohol, smoking, poor diet, stress), environmental and workplace pollution have certainly had a decisive impact on the drastic decline in the quality of seminal fluid, for this reason there are more and more couples who turn to assisted fertilization.
In recent years, an innovative sperm selection methodology applied during an in vitro fertilization cycle has been introduced, namely microflouidic selection. This is used in some cases as an alternative to classic capacitation.
It is a sperm selective method that involves the use of a chip.
The method is based on the principle of natural selection of spermatozoa passing through microchannels that simulate the natural environment of the female reproductive system.
These act as a filter that selects only high-quality sperm. With the use of microfluidic sperm selection, the risk of ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) and damage to sperm DNA is reduced, consequently the selected spermatozoa have a better morphology, non-fragmented DNA and more than double the viability and motility against unselected spermatozoa.
However, with microfluidics, severely compromised seminal fluids (cryptozoospermia, severe oligozoospermia and samples from testicular biopsies and/or needle aspiration) cannot be treated.