Abstract
Hierarchical orders are found throughout all levels of biosystems, from simple biopolymers, subcellular organelles, single cells, and macroscopic tissues to bulky organs. Especially, biological tissues and cells have long been known to exhibit liquid crystal (LC) orders or their structural analogues. Inspired by those native architectures, there has recently been increased interest in research for engineering nanobiomaterials by incorporating LC templates and scaffolds. In this review, we introduce and correlate diverse LC nanoarchitectures with their biological functionalities, in the context of tissue engineering applications. In particular, the tissue-mimicking LC materials with different LC phases and the regenerative potential of hard and soft tissues are summarized. In addition, the multifaceted aspects of LC architectures for developing tissue-engineered products are envisaged. Lastly, a perspective on the opportunities and challenges for applying LC nanoarchitectures in tissue engineering fields is discussed.
Highlights
Liquid crystals (LCs) are ubiquitous in our life [1]
The strength of LC biomaterials lies in their self-assembly behavior and the formation of hierarchical 3D nanoarchitectures with long-range order
The local anisotropy of the 3D architecture in the LC scaffolds provides a versatile strategy to dictate guided cell growth and morphology control, which can be further extended to directed cell differentiation
Summary
LC materials play a central role in modern technology and industry ranging from electronic display devices to optical communication networks [2,3,4], thanks to their softness and flexibility, rapid molecular self-organization/reorganization, and sensitive responsivity to external stimuli [5] For this reason, many researchers have been striving for decades to invent biocompatible LC nanostructures for biomedical applications [6,7]. The rod-like viruses have been shown to undergo a series of lyotropic phase transitions from isotropic, cholesteric, smectic, and columnar, to crystalline phases, as the rod volume fraction increases [47,48]
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