Lining Up

Just as fastidious gardeners might erect a trellis to guide their plants, tissue engineers build microscopic scaffolds to support and steer cell development. To overcome the challenges of precise construction at tiny scales, researchers have been experimenting with imbuing the materials with magnetic properties, which might mean the pieces could be aligned by an external magnetic field. A new study aimed to develop a form of injectable 3D hydrogel (a material that supports cell growth), with rod-shaped microgels containing magnetic nanoparticles. The nanoparticles, made of an iron oxide called maghemite, let researchers create a carefully aligned structure of rods (red in the video, with both parallel and perpendicular arrangements) over which mouse fibroblasts (connective tissue, green and blue) can grow. Tweaking the magnetic field strength or orientation enabled control over the scaffold setup, highlighting the potential of this approach for steering the growth of cells for regeneration and repair.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Dominik L. Braunmiller and colleagues
• Institute of Physical Chemistry, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Advanced Functional Materials, September 2022