Robotic enuleation for oocytes

Abstract

Oocyte enucleation (OE) is a requisite step in animal clone. The traditional OE manipulation requires high professional skills and involves contaminations easily. To address these problems, a robotic enucleation process for oocytes is proposed using traditional micro-operation system. Using imaging processing and motion control, key procedures of OE process, such as global location of oocytes, target cell immobilization, cell-orientation adjustment, cell penetration, and nuclei removing, are realized automatically or robotically. Experimental results demonstrate: 1) this system is capable of performing oocyte enucleation at average speed of 82s/cell; 2) the success rate of totally-removing genetic materials using our method is up to 90%; 3) the development competence of the embryos operated by this method is comparable to those operated by manual operation.