Engineered proteins and three-dimensional printing of living materials
- PDF / 1,887,921 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 76 Downloads / 206 Views
Introduction Additive manufacturing is a bottom-up approach where material is added layer by layer to build the final product. Additive manufacturing is one technique for three-dimensional (3D) printing, which has gained widespread acceptance among athome users as well as industries, including aerospace engineering, defense-related research, and bioengineering. The ease of designing complex 3D models using computer-aided design (CAD) and converting them into readable instructions to direct printhead movement makes 3D printing convenient and accessible. In the field of bioengineering, 3D printing has potential uses in tissue and organ fabrication, implant manufacturing, and DNA storage within everyday objects.1–3 Threedimensional printing of engineered bacteria is an emerging technology with the goal of making biomimetic materials with precise control over the shape, size, and spatial organization. These materials could have functions such as self-healing or responding to the environment, and are highly tunable by engineering the bacteria to produce specific proteins that selfassemble into a desired shape to form a biomaterial with different dimensions or mechanical properties. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of the different techniques developed for bacterial 3D printing. We discuss the significance of 3D printing proteins produced by engineered living cells, and applications of 3D printed biofilms and proteins. We describe the challenges that arise when
engineered cells are embedded within 3D printed hydrogels to produce biomaterials, and we conclude by considering the prospects of this technology.
Pioneering developments in 3D bacteria printing Bacterial additive manufacturing shares similarities with tissue and organ bioprinting, where eukaryotic cells embedded in a biocompatible matrix are dispensed onto a surface to form predesigned patterns.4,5 The application of tissue bioprinting techniques to bacterial bioprinting has required the development of new formulations of bio-ink, which contains living bacterial cells of interest dispersed within a hydrogel matrix along with nutrients for sustaining metabolic activity. During printing, the bio-ink is dispersed through a nozzle onto the printing surface by xyz motion of the printhead to form desired spatial patterns. The printed hydrogel can hold high water content and functions as a scaffold to retain the desired complex geometry after printing while also suspending the bacteria in place. Alginate,3,6,7 agarose,8 Flink-glycidyl methacrylate HA,9 and Pluronic F127-DA10 hydrogels have variously been employed to create bio-inks supporting the fabrication of functional materials using bacterial 3D printing. These hydrogels use differing cross-linking mechanisms to solidify and need to be optimized to have appropriate rheological properties and bacterial compatibility so that they can form complex
Ram Surya Gona, University of Rochester, USA; [email protected] Anne S. Meyer, University of Rochester, USA; [email protected] doi:10.155
Data Loading...
