Microfluidic Sorting: Exhaustion of Racing Sperm in Nature‐Mimicking Microfluidic Channels During Sorting (Small 20/2013)

A simple and cost-effective microfluidic design at the scale of the channels in which sperm swim towards an egg is reported. In these channels, human and mouse sperm movement is quantitatively investigated. As described on page 3374 by E. Tüzel, U. Demirci, and co-workers, a significant role is discovered for mouse sperm exhaustion using experiments and coarse-grained computational modeling. The experimental results are recapitulated by the computational model when mouse sperm is modeled with an average exhaustion time. On the other hand, exhaustion does not play a significant role in human sperm sorting for up to 1 h incubation. The presented platform is broadly applicable to multiple areas including reproductive medicine, veterinary sciences, cryobiology, biobanking, wild life preservation, and cell-taxis studies.