Vitrification is an excellent tool in the IVF laboratory, enabling options and offering flexibility in assisted reproduction. The technology of cryopreservation has been underway since the early 20th century. The advent of vitrification has advanced the expectations in routine clinical practice in the IVF laboratory presenting impressive results both in post-thaw survival, and in clinical pregn...

Interest in oocyte cryopreservation has recently increased with the growing importance of in vitro embryo production, nuclear transfer, and gene banking (Gordon, 1997; Andrus et al., 2000). A relatively recent approach to achieve rapid freezing without the use of expensive freezing devices is called vitrification. Vitrification is defined as the physical process by which a highly concentrated s...

Long-term preservation of complex engineered tissues and organs at cryogenic temperatures in the absence of ice has been prevented to date by the difficulty of discovering combinations of cryoprotectants that are both sufficiently non-toxic and sufficiently stable to allow viability to be maintained and ice formation to be avoided during slow cooling to the glass transition temperature and subs...

Gorgonian corals are slowly declining due to human interaction and environmental impacts. Cryopreservation of gorgonian corals is an ex-situ method of conservation, ensuring future reproduction. The present study assessed the vitrification properties of cryoprotectant (CPT) mixtures using the cryotop, cryoloop and open pulled straw (OPS) cryopereservation methods prior to experimentation on gor...

An approach to organ cryopreservation, namely, vitrification has been review ed by FAHY et al.1). RALL and FAHY2) obtained some promissing results using 8-cell mouse embryos indicating the feasibility of obtaining high survival following rapid freezing by vitrification. However, there have been only a preliminary report2) on the feasibility of obtaining offspring by the vitrification method. Th...

Cryopreservation is a key technology in biology and clinical practice. This paper presents a digital microfluidic device that automates sample preparation for mammalian embryo vitrification. Individual micro droplets manipulated on the microfluidic device were used as micro-vessels to transport a single mouse embryo through a complete vitrification procedure. Advantages of this approach, compar...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the viability and subsequent developmental ability of murine germinal vesicle (GV) oocytes ultrarapidly vitrified after step-wise exposure to cryoprotectants (CPAs). Oocytes were transferred to a vitrification solution composed of 15% ethylene glycol, 15% dimethyl sulfoxide and 0.5 M sucrose in a direct manner (non-preequilibrium) or in a step-wise mann...

Ovulated mouse oocytes denuded of their cumulus cells, were vitrified in a solution containing 7 M ethylene glycol as the sole cryoprotectant using one or two steps of exposure before vitrification and were diluted in 1 M sucrose solution in 5 or 10 min after warming. The results proved that the viability of oocytes are detrimentally affected by exposure to the vitrification solution even witho...

Vitrifying oocytes is a potentially valuable means of preserving the female germ line, but significantly compromises oocyte developmental competence. This study examined the hypothesis that the cumulus complex protects the oocyte during vitrification. Vitrified-warmed immature cumulus oocyte complexes (COCs) were labelled with a plasma membrane impermeant DNA marker (ethidium homodimer-1) to ex...

PURPOSE Our aim was to evaluate the effect of neat semen vitrification on human sperm vital parameters and DNA integrity in men with normal and abnormal sperm parameters. MATERIALS AND METHODS Semen samples were 17 normozoospermic samples and 17 specimens with abnormal sperm parameters. Semen analysis was performed according to World Health Organization (WHO) criteria. Then, the smear was pro...