Diamonds Are A Sperm's Best Friend - Neatorama

In a petri dish, sperms become sluggish. Indeed, "poor sperm performance" is a common problem in IVF or in vitro fertilization.

Turns out, the polystyrene in the petri dish is toxic to the sperms - so what we do to help the sperms? Enter diamond:

Coat a quartz petri dish with a nanolayer of diamond, however, and you've created a cellular safe haven. A much higher percentage of sperm survived for 42 hours in diamond-coated petri dishes like the ones pictured above than in the polystyrene containers usually used for IVF, researchers will report in the Online Proceedings Library of the Materials Research Society.

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For an example of what happens when labs do not use proper controls:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1888126,00.html

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Remember the good old days, when people had sex with other people directly?

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I don't know much about sperms or IVFs, but I do know that when I was in grad school, mammalian cell culture labs did not use glasswares - they only used plastic petri dishes, plastic pipettes, etc, even though they're single use and thus more expensive. Someone explained it to me that mammalian cell cultures cannot tolerate even minute amounts of detergents that's left over after washing glasswares.

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One wonders how a simple quartz petri dish, no diamond, no plastic, would fare... it's not apparent whether diamond makes any difference at all.

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This is way too common. My father published a paper in the 70's describing how accidental and intentional coatings on lab glassware caused inconsistent and inaccurate results. Disposable equipment (like Petri dishs) are the worst because labs do not clean them before use and therefore have an unknown variable.

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