Nitrogen vapor shipment of vitrified oocytes: time for caution.

Oocyte cryopreservation for fertility preservation, in both medical and elective situations, has significantly increased as freezing technology has improved. Slow freezing techniques demonstrated ∼ 50-80% survival of mature oocytes, however vitrification with ∼ 97% survival has become the preferred method for oocyte cryopreservation around the world. Our work investigated the effect of transporting cryopreserved oocytes to and from a long-term storage facility. Our findings demonstrate that extra caution should be practiced for vitrified oocytes, especially when handling and transferring between shipping and long-term cryopreservation storage containers.

Commercially available enhanced in vitro maturation medium does not improve maturation of germinal vesicle and metaphase I oocytes in standard in vitro fertilization cases.

Improvements in in vitro maturation techniques have focused on culture optimization to increase oocyte maturation rates. Specialized culture media, now commercially available, did not perform significantly better than standard IVF culture media for maturation of immature oocytes in our normal IVF cases.