Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing IZFP 
How can the growing demands for animal ethics and sustainability be reconciled with the economic realities of agricultural production? These objectives are often in conflict with each other. The fate of many farm animals is largely predetermined at the moment of their conception. In milk production, for example, male calves are an unavoidable by-product, and due to a lack of economic uses, they often have no choice but to be sent to the slaughterhouse at an early age.
Against this backdrop, the fundamental question arises as to how animal production can be organized in the future in order to minimize ethical problems and ecological disadvantages while at the same time ensuring efficient and economically viable livestock farming. There are various approaches to this. The “XorY – Skip the guy“ project focuses on what is known as “sperm sexing“.
Sperm sexing refers to the use of pre-sorted sperm in livestock breeding, which allows the sex of the offspring to be specifically determined at the time of fertilization. On the one hand, this enables optimized herd management for agricultural businesses and, on the other hand, contributes significantly to improving animal welfare by reducing the number of unwanted offspring, e.g., male calves in milk production. Technically, the process is based on the separation of sperm into X- and Y-chromosome-carrying fractions, which are then used specifically for insemination.
This is where the DISCOVER project “XorY – Skip the guy“ comes in, which is being carried out in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM and the Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing IZFP. The aim of the project is to develop a particularly gentle and parallelizable method for sperm separation through the innovative combination of ultrasound techniques from non-destructive testing with microfluidic microsystem technology.
With the help of the ultrasound expertise available at Fraunhofer IZFP, a standing wave induced by an ultrasonic transducer is generated across the sample stream, enabling targeted, contactless, and cell-friendly parallelization of the sperm. In the further course of the microfluidic system, the Y-chromosome-carrying sperm are to be detected so that they can be specifically inactivated. The aim is to selectively use X chromosome-carrying sperm to enable gender-targeted fertilization.