A new approach to fabricate agarose microstructures

Abstract

Agarose hydrogels find wide applications in different fields such as biological sciences, tissue engineering and food industry, and its use has been investigated in many fields ranging from electronics to crystallography. Usually, agarose structures are made by casting, and more recently some attempts have been made to build agarose structures by additive manufacturing. All of the fabrication methods are based on thermo-reversible gelling properties of agarose gel. A new method to fabricate agarose microstructures in a binary solvent composed of water and dimethyl sulfoxide is presented and modelled in this paper. This new method allows building agarose structures by an additive layer-by-layer approach using a modified inkjet printer. The fabrication method and printing device are described in detail. Furthermore, finite-element model simulations, which predict with high confidence the final line width of the printed structures, are discussed and analysed. Mechanical properties of printed gel structures are comparable with those obtained by gel casting, as demonstrated by tensile testing. The presented results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach to fabricate agarose structures with more complex shapes that can be done by casting

Thermal Bioprinting Causes Ample Alterations of Expression of LUCAT1, IL6, CCL26, and NRN1L Genes and Massive Phosphorylation of Critical Oncogenic Drug Resistance Pathways in Breast Cancer Cells

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Design and Validation of an Open-Hardware Print-Head for Bioprinting Application

“…The high resolution and the ability to eject small volume drops on different types of substrate, without contact and in predefined paths, are the features that enabled DOD technology to expand its application fields, as biology and materials science where many protocols require the ability to deposit small amounts of solutions in predefined position, such as for the fabrication of DNA microarrays [1]. In the field of Biofabrication, inkjet printers have been widely used to spot a gradient of growth factors [2], to print living cells [3], and to built scaffolds [4]. Indeed, using a layer-by layer approach typical of rapid prototyping systems, 2D and 3D well-defined structures have been built using biomaterials, cells and biomolecules for application in tissue engineering and in regenerative medicine [5].…”

Multimaterial, heterogeneous, and multicellular three-dimensional bioprinting

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