TY - JOUR
KW - Cervix Chip
KW - Hyaluronic acid
KW - microfluidics
KW - Sperm
AU - Sai-Xi Yu
AU - Yanan Liu
AU - Yi Wu
AU - Hao Luo
AU - Rufei Huang
AU - Ya-Jun Wang
AU - Xuemei Wang
AU - Hai Gao
AU - Huijuan Shi
AU - Guangyin Jing
AU - Yan-Jun Liu
AB - As the gate for sperm swimming into the female reproductive tract, cervix is full of cervical mucus, which plays an important role in sperm locomotion. The fact that sperm cannot pass through the cervical mucus-cervix microenvironment will cause the male infertility. However, how the sperm swim across the cervix microenvironment remains elusive. We used hyaluronic acid (HA), a substitute of cervical mucus to mimic cervix microenvironment and designed a cervix chip to study sperm selection and behavior. An accumulation of sperm in HA confirmed that HA served as a reservoir for sperm, similar to cervical mucus. We found that sperm escaping from HA exhibited higher motility than the sperm accessing into HA, suggesting that HA functions as a filter to select sperm with high activity. Our findings construct a practical platform to explore the sophisticated interaction of sperm with cervix microenvironment, with elaborate swimming indicators thus provide a promising cervix chip for sperm selection with kinematic features on-demand. What's more, the cervix chip allows the convenient use in clinical infertility diagnosis, owing to the advantage of simple, fast and high efficiency.
BT - Biosensors and Bioelectronics
DA - 2022-05-15
DO - 10.1016/j.bios.2022.114040
N2 - As the gate for sperm swimming into the female reproductive tract, cervix is full of cervical mucus, which plays an important role in sperm locomotion. The fact that sperm cannot pass through the cervical mucus-cervix microenvironment will cause the male infertility. However, how the sperm swim across the cervix microenvironment remains elusive. We used hyaluronic acid (HA), a substitute of cervical mucus to mimic cervix microenvironment and designed a cervix chip to study sperm selection and behavior. An accumulation of sperm in HA confirmed that HA served as a reservoir for sperm, similar to cervical mucus. We found that sperm escaping from HA exhibited higher motility than the sperm accessing into HA, suggesting that HA functions as a filter to select sperm with high activity. Our findings construct a practical platform to explore the sophisticated interaction of sperm with cervix microenvironment, with elaborate swimming indicators thus provide a promising cervix chip for sperm selection with kinematic features on-demand. What's more, the cervix chip allows the convenient use in clinical infertility diagnosis, owing to the advantage of simple, fast and high efficiency.
PY - 2022
EP - 114040
T2 - Biosensors and Bioelectronics
TI - Cervix chip mimicking cervical microenvironment for quantifying sperm locomotion
UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095656632200080X
VL - 204
Y2 - 2026-01-07
SN - 0956-5663
ER -