A team of English scientists has developped a technology analogous to an inkjet printer, but that allowed to “print” live mouse brain cells and human T-Cells. Despite being subject to a pretty impressive electric field (30 kV over 15 millimeters), the cells continued to behave normally after their printing.
The device is a variant of a conventional ink-jet printer. Instead of forcing individual droplets of ink through a needle-shaped nozzle and onto the page, the cell printer uses a powerful electric field to produce droplets just a few micrometres in diameter, far smaller than is achievable by other means.
Several research groups have shown that modified ink-jet printers can spray droplets of live cells suspended in a sustaining solution. But these devices have not been able to print droplets smaller than 20 µm across, because ultra-fine nozzles are prone to blocking. Now the “electro-spray”, developed by Suwan Jayasinghe of University College London along with Peter Eagles and Amer Qureshi at King’s College London, has for the first time been able to produce droplets as small as a few micrometres in diameter, each containing only a handful of living cells.
The real issue here is whether we can do something interesting with this technology. It will become truly interesting the day we can “print” complex 3D structures that we can engineer on the computer.
Story to appear in New Scientist’s January 28th Edition.
January 25th, 2006 | General Science