Chapter 11 Human Embryo Vitrification.

Cryopreservation is one of the keystones in clinical infertility treatment. In particular vitrification has become a well-established and widely used routine procedure that has allowed important expansion of therapeutic strategies when IVF is used to treat infertility. Vitrification of human blastocysts allows us to maximize the potential for conception from any single in vitro fertilization cycle and prevents wastage of embryos. The technology may even be used to eliminate fresh embryo transfers for reasons of convenience, uterine receptivity, fertility preservation, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or emergency management. In this chapter, the application of vitrification technology for cryopreserving human blastocysts will be revealed through step-by-step protocols. The results that are presented using the described protocols underscore the robustness of the vitrification technology for embryo cryopreservation.