Weining Bian, PhD - PhD GraduateMy research project is to engineer relatively large and thick artificial muscle tissue constructs with densely packed, uniformly aligned and highly differentiated myofibers. I have developed a simplified hydrogel micromolding approach utilizing the microfabricated posts to simultaneously create pores within the tissue constructs for better oxygen and nutrient transport and induce uniform 3D cell alignment during the process of constrained cell-mediated gel compaction. This approach has been proved feasible to generate muscle tissue networks made of both skeletal myoblasts and cardiomyocytes.rn
Figure 1. A) 3D OCT (optical coherence tomography) image showing the topology of the formed muscle tissue network. An optical cross-section (denoted by ‘S’) was also obtained. B) Aligned myotubes were striated and myogenin-positive 10 days after differentiation was initiated. C) Cell orientation map was overlayed on the microscopic image of the tissue network. The distribution of cell orientation angles shown in the bottom histogram revealed the high degree of uniaxial cell alignment.Back to Personnel