Oil can be the most important determining factor to your success!
It is well known that oil batches vary and can be a serious cause of impaired embryo development.
Selecting the best quality overlaying oil is particularly important to improve developmental rates of embryos produced by in vitro systems.
IVF Bioscience’s Oil, is unique as it is washed twice with ultra-pure water and then filtered through a 0.2µm filter for optimal sterilisation. It is a pharmaceutical grade, light paraffin oil.
Oxidation of paraffin oil produces peroxides, which are highly reactive and damaging to any cells they come into contact with.
To ensure these oxidation products are not present within our product, our oil is tested against strict embryo development criteria to determine the peroxide value (POV).
Quality Control:
Our Oil is the only oil in the market that undergoes the stringent quality control for sterility, density, viscosity, endotoxins, peroxide value and MEA testing.
Each batch of IVF Bioscience media comes with a LOT-specific certificate. Why not find out more about how we determine the shelf life of each of our products?
Why is washing and filtering oil important?
Washing and saturating Oil with ultra-pure water avoids critical components of the media, such as hormones and growth factors, getting absorbed into the oil and thus affecting the concentration of the media. Filtering oil ensures that the oil is sterile to ensure highest quality in your IVF system.
Certain stages of bovine in vitro production require an oil overlay to protect against media evaporation, especially when you are incubating for extended periods (i.e. in vitro culture) or working with drops.
Evaporation increases osmolality and affects the overall composition as concentration of media components are increased with loss of evaporated water.
Top Tip:
When using an oil overlay, the lid should be placed half open on the 4WP to ensure that equilibration can occur (even 1μl of oil in the lid forms a seal, preventing equilibration with CO2 and all your embryos will die).
