Yale engineers create “magic carpet” that guides cells to self-organize in 3D | News
While scientists have previously managed to do so in 2D environments, creating a 3D environment for cells has been a challenge. Luo chalks that up to “two things that are at odds with each other.” On one hand, you can create an environment with “rails” – structures to guide the cells into assembly, a method that researchers have used previously. But that restricts the cells to 2-dimensional movements.
“So you want something to guide the assembly, but then also decouple it from what’s been assembled,” she said. “And it turned out that it’s really difficult to do in 3D.”
To that end, Luo and her research team created what she calls a “magic carpet,” that is, they fabricated a self-organizing, cell-laden environment made from liquid crystal-templated hydrogel fibers and biodegradable collagen.
They also used a photopatterning system that they designed and built in the Luo laboratory. Photopatterning is a technique traditionally used to create specific patterns of liquid crystal mesogens—and by extension, hydrogel fibers—but not cells directly. However, researchers can indirectly influence cell alignment by using photopatterning to guide the alignment of the hydrogel fibers (the “magic carpet” the cells sit on). This alignment can propagate into the 3D, thereby enabling the formation of patterned, tissue-like structures.
The approach allowed them to program the collective forces exerted by the cells, resulting in predefined macroscopic shape changes in the cell-laden matrix. For instance, Luo and her team were able to program the collective alignment of cells to shape the collagen matrix into a square, and then transition that to the shape of a diamond.
