Improving preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) reliability by selection of sperm donor with the most informative haplotype

Background: The study is aimed to describe a novel strategy that increases the accuracy and reliability of PGD in patients using sperm donation by pre-selecting the donor whose haplotype does not overlap the carrier's one. Methods: A panel of 4-9 informative polymorphic markers, flanking the mutation in carriers of autosomal dominant/X-linked disorders, was tested in DNA of sperm donors before PGD. Whenever the lengths of donors' repeats overlapped those of the women, additional donors' DNA samples were analyzed. The donor that demonstrated the minimal overlapping with the patient was selected for IVF. Results: In 8 out of 17 carriers the markers of the initially chosen donors overlapped the patients' alleles and 2-8 additional sperm donors for each patient were haplotyped. The selection of additional sperm donors increased the number of informative markers and reduced misdiagnosis risk from 6.00%±7.48 to 0.48% ±0.68. The PGD results were confirmed and no misdiagnosis was detected. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that pre-selecting a sperm donor whose haplotype has minimal overlapping with the female's haplotype, is critical for reducing the misdiagnosis risk and ensuring a reliable PGD. This strategy may contribute to prevent the transmission of affected IVF-PGD embryos using a simple and economical procedure. Trial registration: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. DNA testing of donors was approved by the institutional Helsinki committee (registration number 319-08TLV, 2008). The present study was approved by the institutional Helsinki committee (registration number 0385-13TLV, 2013).