Head‐attached live sperm cell for label‐free micro‐Raman evaluation of sperm DNA integrity: A preliminary study

Abstract

High‐quality spermatozoa are essential for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. However, there is still a lack of noninvasive, objective tools that provide biochemical characteristics to select high‐quality spermatozoa in clinical settings. In this work, a facile yet efficient approach was proposed, rendering the live sperm cell with its head being attached on the surface of a substrate, which allows the subsequent micro‐Raman‐based biochemical analysis and evaluation of sperm DNA integrity noninvasively and nondestructively. Moreover, our preliminary results show that Raman peaks at 1,050 and 1,095 cm−1, which are assigned to DNA backbone mode and whose spectral intensity ratio are suggested as a potential spectral biomarker for evaluation of sperm DNA integrity, can be clearly observed, thus implying our facile yet efficient technique for further potential DNA integrity assessment of live sperm cell.

Micro-Raman Analysis of Sperm Cells on Glass Slide: Potential Label-Free Assessment of Sperm DNA toward Clinical Applications

“…Figure 1 a shows a representative bright-field image of sperm cells on glass, where the sperm morphological structures (sperm tail, sperm head with acrosome area) can be clearly observed. Figure 1 b compares the Raman signals obtained from sperm cell heads and glass substrate, the characteristic Raman bands from the sperm head area on the glass slide, are mainly found in 1200–1800 cm −1 , consistent with the previous results [ 33 , 34 ]. As expected, a prominent and broad background interference from glass centered at 1050 to 1150 cm −1 that overlaps the Raman characteristic peaks from sperm cells was observed.…”