Chromatin intact human sperm recovery is higher following glass wool column filtration as compared with density gradient centrifugation

Summary The sperm DNA quality as determined by chromatin integrity has been reported to be associated with in vivo and in vitro fertility. However, previous studies have evaluated preparation procedures to select motile, morphologically normal and mature spermatozoa, but not the spermatozoa with intact sperm chromatin. To determine which technique yields a population of spermatozoa with improved DNA quality, split ejaculate was processed with density gradient centrifugation (DGC) procedure and glass wool column filtration (GWF) procedure. The processed samples were analysed for sperm DNA quality using the acridine orange staining method on flow cytometry. The GWF procedure decreases the percentage of spermatozoa with DNA fragmentation resulting in more intact chromatin in the processed sample. There is a need to design a clinical study with GWF for assisted reproductive technology.