Cryopreservation & ICSI | Fertility Institute of New Orleans

Video transcript with Embryologist Beanie W.

Hi guys! I’m coming to you today from our cryo lab here in the IVF center.

Cryopreservation

If you’ve ever wondered where your eggs and your frozen embryos get stored this is where they are stored – in these liquid nitrogen tanks. And they stay maintained at a liquid temperature of -180 degrees.

So, it’s really simple. Even during an emergency hurricane situation, we top the tanks off full of liquid nitrogen and that will maintain the integrity of your samples for up to two weeks. These tanks are on a continuous alarm system, 24 hours a day, 365 days out of the year, so that we can monitor the temperature to know and ensure that your samples are safe and protected.

ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection)

So here we have some eggs post-retrieval and they just had the granulosa and the cumulus cells stripped off of them. These four eggs right here, this patient is going to be an ICSI patient where we inject the sperm directly into each egg.

So, today I want to show you just how amazing the ICSI procedure is. So, ICSI stands for intracytoplasmic sperm injection and you’re going to see in just a second we’re going to inject this little sperm here into our egg. This is the polar body right here that tells us the egg is mature. It’s ready to accept sperm and fertilize. And you’re going to see where we position our needle. We actually want to stay away from that polar body to not damage the DNA within the egg.

Here comes the sperm. We’re going to stop it right here. We’re going to go into our egg. Then we’re going to pull back on our egg just a little to break that membrane. And then slowly inject the sperm into the egg. Right there. And the ICSI is complete.

That’s it for today. Keep an eye out for future sneak peeks of what goes on behind the lab door.