Optimal Design for Artificial Organoids: Inverse Design of Muscle-Epithelial Bilayer Morphing System

Research shows that muscle cells can be optogenetically modified, causing the muscle to contract in response to external laser lights. This discovery provides a new approach to designing and making artificial organoids by morphing a muscle-epithelial bilayer system (a contracting optogenetically modified muscle layer on top of an inactive epithelial layer). By 3D printing the designed muscle layer pattern and shining a laser on it, we can control the resulting contraction shape of the bilayer system. Literature has shown that such bilayer systems can produce large nonlinear deformation. However, most works focus only on the forward problem: understanding the deformation from a given set of pre-chosen parameters. In this work, we are posing the inverse problem: understanding how to choose design parameters given a desired deformed shape. Our goal is to design the muscle layer pattern optimally. To achieve this goal, we built a finite element (FEM) model simulating the nonlinear deformations and studied the inverse design problem with a large dataset generated by the FEM model. Understanding the inverse design problem of the bilayer system is useful for designing artificial organoids, and this methodology can be extended broadly to the design of soft robotics.