Head‐attached Live Sperm Cell for Label‐free Micro‐raman Evaluation of Sperm DNA Integrity: A Preliminary Study

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.