title: High-Throughput Fabrication and Modular Assembly of 3D Heterogeneous Microscale Tissues.
abstract: 3D hydrogel microstructures that encapsulate cells have been used in broad applications in microscale tissue engineering, personalized drug screening, and regenerative medicine. Recent technological advances in microstructure assembly, such as bioprinting, magnetic assembly, microfluidics, and acoustics, have enabled the construction of designed 3D tissue structures with spatially organized cells in vitro. However, a bottleneck exists that still hampers the application of microtissue structures, due to a lack of techniques that combined high-throughput fabrication and flexible assembly. Here, a versatile method for fabricating customized microstructures and reorganizing building blocks composed of functional components into a combined single geometric shape is demonstrated. The arbitrary microstructures are dynamically synthesized in a microfluidic device and then transferred to an optically induced electrokinetics chip for manipulation and assembly. Moreover, building blocks containing different cells can be arranged into a desired geometry with specific shape and size, which can be used for microscale tissue engineering.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110000, P. R. China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Wenguang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110000, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Haibo
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110000, P. R. China.|University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Gongxin
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110000, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yuechao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110000, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Lianqing
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D020100:Hydrogels / Q000737:chemistry; D044085:Microfluidics / Q000379:methods; D023822:Tissue Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D054457:Tissue Scaffolds / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D020100:Hydrogels
keywords: microfabrication; modular assembly; tissue engineering