Abstract
Microfluidically manufacturing graphene-alginate microfibers create possibilities for encapsulating rat neural cells within conductive 3D tissue scaffolding to enable the creation of real-time 3D sensing arrays with high physiological relavancy. Cells are encapsulated using the biopolymer alginate, which is combined with graphene to create a cell-containing hydrogel with increased electrical conductivity. Resulting novel alginate-graphene microfibers showed a 2.5-fold increase over pure alginate microfibers, but did not show significant differences in size and porosity. Cells encapsulated within the microfibers survive for up to eight days, and maintain approximately 20% live cells over that duration. The biocompatible aqueous graphene suspension used in this investigation was obtained via liquid phase exfoliation of pristine graphite, to create a graphene-alginate pre-hydrogel solution.
Highlights
Hydrogel microfibers have many applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, where they are favored for their physical and chemical properties, as well as their reproducible and cell-safe fabrication methods (Bai et al, 2014)
This study aims to provide preliminary proof on the applicability of such scaffolds.Cutting-edge breakthroughs in the fabrication of biocompatible and stable aqueous graphene suspensions enable the encapsulation of both graphene and cells within the alginate hydrogel, therebyproving the concept that the addition of a highly conductive element within a biocompatible hydrogel can pave the way to real-time sensing platforms with control over cell location
This is to be expected, since graphene flakes generated by the kitchen blender method small enough in size that they do not drastically change the behavior of the alginate as it passes through the microfluidic device
Summary
Hydrogel microfibers have many applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, where they are favored for their physical and chemical properties, as well as their reproducible and cell-safe fabrication methods (Bai et al, 2014). A variety of biocompatible polymers are utilized for this method of microfiber creation; among them, alginate is favored within biomedical applications for its good biocompatibility, biodegradability, and low toxicity, as well as its capacity for gelation within mild conditions (Meng et al, 2016; McNamara et al, 2017, 2019b) These factors have garnered interest for alginate for cell encapsulation (Kim et al, 2007; Leong et al, 2016), which requires cells to be present during the gelation of the microfibers, thereby eliminating the possibility of cell loss but requiring cell-safe gelation conditions (Kim et al, 2007). Encapsulating cells within the conductive hydrogel restricts the spatial location of the cells, better enabling long-term studies
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