3D cell assembly via anode electrode manipulation

Cell culture is a basic and significant task in biological engineering. Many cell culture works have been studied up to now. However, the cell is always cultured in a 2D plate in current techniques. Thus, the cells can only growth on a flat plate, which condition is far from that in vivo. Hydrogel is a kind of biocompatible material, inside with the cell can spread and growth. It provides us a method to study 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 method to control the gel´s shape and position based on the manipulation of the anode electrode. 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.