Abstract
This paper describes a light-addressable electrolytic system used to perform an electrodeposition of magnetically-guided cells encapsulated in alginate hydrogels using a digital micromirror device (DMD) for three-dimensional cell patterning. In this system, the magnetically-labeled cells were first manipulated into a specific arrangement by changing the orientation of the magnetic field, and then a patterned light illumination was projected onto a photoconductive substrate serving as a photo-anode to cause gelation of calcium alginate through sol-gel transition. By controlling the illumination pattern on the DMD, we first successfully produced cell-encapsulated multilayer alginate hydrogels with different shapes and sizes in each layer via performing multiplexed micropatterning. By combining the magnetically-labeled cells, light-addressable electrodeposition, and orientation of the magnetic fields, we have successfully demonstrated to fabricate two layers of the cell-encapsulated alginate hydrogels, where cells in each layer can be manipulated into cross-directional arrangements that mimic natural tissue. Our proposed method provides a programmable method for the spatiotemporally controllable assembly of cell populations into three-dimensional cell patterning and could have a wide range of biological applications in tissue engineering, toxicology, and drug discovery.
Highlights
Many complex human organs consist of multiple types of cells orderly organized in a complex pattern to meet specific functional needs of the organ [1,2]
Our previous work [14] proposed an alternative approach to produce cell-encapsulated alginate hydrogels by utilizing a light-addressable electrolytic system to perform an electrodeposition of calcium alginate hydrogels using a digital micromirror device (DMD)
We proposed a light-addressable electrolytic system used to perform an electrodeposition of magnetically-guided cells encapsulated in alginate hydrogels using a DMD for 3D cell patterning
Summary
Many complex human organs consist of multiple types of cells orderly organized in a complex pattern to meet specific functional needs of the organ [1,2]. A biocompatible polysaccharide of sodium alginate, which can form a calcium alginate gel in the presence of calcium ions (Ca2+), is widely used to entrap and immobilize prokaryotes and eukaryotic cells in 3D hydrogel structures [3,4,5] Among these fabrication methods to form alginate hydrogels, electroaddressing is an attractive technique due to its ability to deposit alginate hydrogels [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] at specific addresses and in specific shapes with a controllable pattern on the preformed metal thin-film electrode surfaces. Formation of cell-encapsulated multilayer alginate hydrogels with different shapes and sizes in each layer via performing multiplexed micropatterning was not demonstrated in our previous work
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