3D Cell Assembly based on Moveable Electrode Manipulation

Cell culture is a key technique for tissue engineering and the creation of organs. Many cell culture workshave been studied up to now. However, these works are mainly focusing on the cell culture on a plate. Therefore, the cells can only growth on a flat plate, which environment is different from in vivo. Hydrogel is a kind of biocompatible material, inside with the cell can spread and growth. It provides us a method tostudy the cell’s property in real 3D environment. Thus, how to control the shape of the gel is an important topic. In this paper, we proposed a direct writing method to control the gel’s shape and position based on micro manipulation. The gel generation is based on the electrodeposition of calcium alginate. The reaction speed is controlled by the applied current. Three examples were demonstrated to show how our system is working. The result shows that straight gel line, arbitrary gel shape on substrate and multi-layer gel structure can be obtained by this proposed method.