Different cell types make up tissues and organs hierarchically and communicate within a complex, three-dimensional (3D) en- vironment. The in vitro recapitulation of tissue-like structures is meaningful, not only for ...Different cell types make up tissues and organs hierarchically and communicate within a complex, three-dimensional (3D) en- vironment. The in vitro recapitulation of tissue-like structures is meaningful, not only for fundamental cell biology research, but also for tissue engineering (TE). Currently, TE research adopts either the top-down or bottom-up approach. The top-down approach involves defining the macroscopic tissue features using biomaterial scaffolds and seeding cells into these scaffolds. Conversely, the bottom-up approach aims at crafting small tissue building blocks with precision-engineered structural and functional microscale features, using physical and/or chemical approaches. The bottom-up strategy takes advantage of the repeating structural and functional units that facilitate cell-cell interactions and cultures multiple cells together as a functional unit of tissue. In this review, we focus on currently available microscale methods that can control mammalian cells to assemble into 3D tissue-like structures.展开更多
基金supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of China(Grant Nos.2009CB930001 and 2011CB933201)Chinese Academy ofSciences(Grant No.KJCX2-YW-M15)the National Natural ScienceFoundation of China(Grant Nos.20890020,90813032,21025520 and 51073045)
文摘Different cell types make up tissues and organs hierarchically and communicate within a complex, three-dimensional (3D) en- vironment. The in vitro recapitulation of tissue-like structures is meaningful, not only for fundamental cell biology research, but also for tissue engineering (TE). Currently, TE research adopts either the top-down or bottom-up approach. The top-down approach involves defining the macroscopic tissue features using biomaterial scaffolds and seeding cells into these scaffolds. Conversely, the bottom-up approach aims at crafting small tissue building blocks with precision-engineered structural and functional microscale features, using physical and/or chemical approaches. The bottom-up strategy takes advantage of the repeating structural and functional units that facilitate cell-cell interactions and cultures multiple cells together as a functional unit of tissue. In this review, we focus on currently available microscale methods that can control mammalian cells to assemble into 3D tissue-like structures.
