Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, Institute of Translational Medicine, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing, 210008, China.
State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
Adv Sci (Weinh). 2022 May;9(16):e2105777. doi: 10.1002/advs.202105777. Epub 2022 Mar 28.
Heart-on-a-chip plays an important role in revealing the biological mechanism and developing new drugs for cardiomyopathy. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to developing heart-on-a-chip systems featuring simplified fabrication, accurate imitation and microphysiological visuality. In this paper, the authors present a novel electroconductive and anisotropic structural color hydrogel by simply polymerizing non-close-packed colloidal arrays on super aligned carbon nanotube sheets (SACNTs) for visualized and accurate heart-on-a-chip construction. The generated anisotropic hydrogel consists of a colloidal array-locked hydrogel layer with brilliant structural color on one surface and a conductive methacrylated gelatin (GelMA)/SACNTs film on the other surface. It is demonstrated that the anisotropic morphology of the SACNTs could effectively induce the alignment of cardiomyocytes, and the conductivity of SACNTs could contribute to the synchronous beating of cardiomyocytes. Such consistent beating rhythm caused the deformation of the hydrogel substrates and dynamic shifts in structural color and reflection spectra of the whole hybrid hydrogels. More attractively, with the integration of such cardiomyocyte-driven living structural color hydrogels and microfluidics, a visualized heart-on-a-chip system with more consistent beating frequency has been established for dynamic cardiomyocyte sensing and drug screening. The results indicate that the electroconductive and anisotropic structural color hydrogels are potential for various biomedical applications.
芯片心脏在揭示心肌病的生物学机制和开发新药方面发挥着重要作用。人们付出了巨大的努力来开发具有简化制造、准确模拟和微生理可视化功能的芯片心脏系统。本文作者通过简单地在超取向碳纳米管片（SACNTs）上聚合非密堆积胶体阵列，提出了一种新颖的导电各向异性结构色水凝胶，用于可视化和准确构建芯片心脏。所生成的各向异性水凝胶由胶体阵列锁定水凝胶层组成，其一个表面具有绚丽的结构色，另一个表面具有导电的甲基丙烯酰化明胶（GelMA）/SACNTs 薄膜。实验表明，SACNTs 的各向异性形态可以有效地诱导心肌细胞的排列，并且 SACNTs 的导电性有助于心肌细胞的同步跳动。这种一致的跳动节律导致水凝胶基底的变形以及整个混合水凝胶的结构色和反射光谱的动态变化。更吸引人的是，通过整合这种由心肌细胞驱动的活的结构色水凝胶和微流控技术，建立了一个具有更一致跳动频率的可视化芯片心脏系统，用于动态心肌细胞传感和药物筛选。结果表明，导电各向异性结构色水凝胶具有广泛的生物医学应用潜力。
