Acoustic bubble for cell patterning and co-culture

Over the past few years, a variety of progress in tissue engineering has been achieved to construct artificial tissue models. As a powerful tool to control the position and organization of cells, cell patterning techniques play an important role in the development of various biomedical applications. Acoustic manipulation is a technique that can actively control the cells to the desired location using physical phenomena. Among these approaches, the acoustic bubble is a promising tool to manipulate cells and fluids with high biocompatibility. In this talk, we will introduce an acoustic bubble-based microfluidic platform for cell patterning and co-culture in complex structures. We will first introduce the approach of forming bubbles with different geometries. Then the two modes of bubbles under different driving frequencies and the mechanism of patterning will be introduced. Using this method, we will demonstrate the particle and cell patterning with complex geometric shapes in our microfluidic platform. Furthermore, a co-culture model is demonstrated using this approach, enabling patterning and co-culture of different types of cells in a pre-designed structure. This approach provides a simple, inexpensive, and effective way for cell patterning and co-culture. In future, this work will be further applied to pattern multiple types of cells for various in vitro biomedical research, such as studying the cell-cell interaction, multicellular tissue construction and drug testing.