Programming living tissues to form 3D shapes made super easy:

Science has advanced beyond it's predecessors and improving with new technological advancements each year. Changing the boundary between biology and technology as scientific researchers discover more and more parallels between the two. Today they have found that it’s relatively simple to essentially hack living tissue by programming a pattern into cells, making them grow and fold on their own into shapes like bowls, coils, and boxes.

From the image above you can see how the tissues fold up into different shapes taking up a new formation. Bio-compatible machines are built from living cells as an idea that’s been pursued for many years, but often times the way tissue is made to form a shape is by restricting its growth with a mold or essentially 3D printing it by laying down the tissue bit by bit.

With this new and improved technique, it allows the cells to grow more or less as normal, but uses a technique called - DNA-programmed Assembly of Cells (DPAC) to guide that growth. This means the cells themselves develop normally, the programmed DNA isn’t in the cells themselves, but rather is laid down in a sort of template that causes them to organize differently in different ways.

Zev Gartner shared these;
“It was astonishing to me about how well this idea worked and how simply the cells behave,” he said and also“Development is starting to become a canvas for engineering, and by breaking the complexity of development down into simpler engineering principles, scientists are beginning to better understand, and ultimately control, the fundamental biology.”

The research team is based out of UC San Francisco - published on the journal of Developmental Cell.