title: Microscale methods to assemble mammalian cells into tissue-like structures.
abstract: Different cell types make up tissues and organs hierarchically and communicate within a complex, three-dimensional (3D) environment. The in vitro recapitulation of tissue-like structures is meaningful, not only for fundamental cell biology research, but also for tissue engineering (TE). Currently, TE research adopts either the top-down or bottom-up approach. The top-down approach involves defining the macroscopic tissue features using biomaterial scaffolds and seeding cells into these scaffolds. Conversely, the bottom-up approach aims at crafting small tissue building blocks with precision-engineered structural and functional microscale features, using physical and/or chemical approaches. The bottom-up strategy takes advantage of the repeating structural and functional units that facilitate cell-cell interactions and cultures multiple cells together as a functional unit of tissue. In this review, we focus on currently available microscale methods that can control mammalian cells to assemble into 3D tissue-like structures.
authors.affiliation: College of Chemistry, Sichuan University, Cheng 610064, China.
authors.forename: Peiyuan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.forename: Wen
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.forename: Xingyu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jiang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004586:Electrophoresis; D057927:Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Interactions; D055672:Static Electricity; D023822:Tissue Engineering; D054457:Tissue Scaffolds