Hannah Lyons

Yes.

Yeah.

Outside of creating like a vacuum chamber and things like that.

Well, you just immediately kill your cells.

Yes.

So we had access to this machine, which beautifully fit in our culturing incubator.

And then we were able to, we had to find a system which would allow us to make a closed loop where there was no air in the system.

It was completely filled with liquid, which gave us our culturing environment that we were then able to add sperm into the plug at one end and collect at the other end when we were plugging the device.

It's a 3D Clinistat.

No, it's been around for a while.

Yeah.

not at the moment so um we are working with a group of engineers who make microfluidic devices and they're talking about being able to put a very small camera into their microfluidic device which we could then put onto this microgravity machine and potentially be able to live watch either the embryos or the sperm but at the moment we are we can only obviously put it in there and assess afterwards

Yeah, so the first iteration of the experiments was just knowing, can the sperm survive?

Will they still be able to swim to any capacity?

And can they get from A to B?

So they were challenged along a channel slide.

So we put them in one end, collected the other end.

And yeah, so first and foremost, that's what we looked at.

We've got a semen analysis machine at the university and we were able to test the sperm before they went in the machine.

Once they'd gone in the machine and then we had a normal gravity control that we ran alongside.