Xiangli Niu

By Xiangli Niu, Yanping Lao, Yan Sun and Weihua Wang

High proportion of human embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) are aneuploidy or have segmental chromosomal errors. Not only a whole chromosome aneuploidy, but also small errors in a chromosome, such as microdeletion can be detected by current next-generation sequencing (NGS) for preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). The prevalence of aneuploidy in donor egg IVF was significantly different between fertility clinics. In the present study, we examined whether different embryo biopsy procedures affect embryonic aneuploidies in donor egg IVF. We did not find significant differences in the samples with abnormal chromosomes between two biopsy methods. When we further analyzed the samples with abnormal chromosomes, we found that 64.0–80.7% of the abnormalities were whole chromosome aneuploidies while 19.3–36.0% were segmental chromosome abnormalities. High embryo implantation rates were obtained after transferring screened euploid blastocysts. These results indicate that blastocyst biopsy procedures may not significantly affect embryo’s chromosomal status, but PGT by high-resolution NGS revealed that high proportions of human embryos derived from donor eggs are not only aneuploidy, but also segmental chromosome abnormal, and screening of small chromosomal errors by NGS is beneficial to patients who use donated eggs for infertility treatment.

Part of the book: Cytogenetics

By Xiangli Niu, Hua Huang, Yi Mo, Yan Sun and Wei-Hua Wang

Recently, some sperm vitrification devices were developed to simplify the procedures to freeze small number of human sperm. In the present study, we used these devices to further examine some factors that affect sperm motility after fast freezing. Experiments were designed to examine the effects of 1) direct immersion of the devices to liquid nitrogen and indirect immersion of the devices to liquid nitrogen in which the devices were sealed in cryogenic storage vials; 2) different freezing volumes (1–5 μl); 3) different equilibration times (1–5 min); and 4) different ratio of freezing solution (0,1-5,1) on post thawing sperm motility. It was found that fast sperm freezing in the sealed vials had high post thawing sperm motility (91.3–93.7% of recovered sperm motility rates) while direct immersion of the devices to liquid nitrogen had 0% post thawing sperm motility. No differences in the recovered sperm motility rates were observed between different freezing solution volumes (87.4–90.5%), different equilibration times (89.5–94.0%), and different freezing solution ratios (90.8–94.6%). However, only 6.8% of recovered sperm motility rate was obtained if sperm were frozen in the medium without sperm freezing solution. These results indicate that human sperm can be rapidly frozen after the devices are sealed in the vials with different equilibration time in the medium containing sperm freezing solution. High post thawing sperm motility can be recovered with this method so that ~90% of sperm are usable after freezing.

Part of the book: Infertility and Assisted Reproduction