An anisotropic hydrogel for visual heart-on-a-chip construction

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Abstract

“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.”

a) Schematic diagram of the fabrication and assembly of heart-on-a-chip for drug evaluation. b) Optical photograph showing the derived heart-on-a-chip. Scale bar is 1 cm. c,d) Microscopy photographs showing the structural color variation in the functional hydrogel c) without or d) with isoproterenol stimulation. Scale bar is 0.5 mm. e) Statistic graph showing the relationship between shift values and beating velocity under different isoproterenol concentrations. f) Relationship revealing the shift values of wavelength and beating frequency change under different concentrations of isoproterenol. Error bars represent SDs (n = 5). Reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License from Sun, L., Chen, Z., Xu, D., Zhao, Y., Electroconductive and Anisotropic Structural Color Hydrogels for Visual Heart-on-a-Chip Construction. Adv. Sci. 2022, 2105777.

Figures and the abstract are reproduced from Sun, L., Chen, Z., Xu, D., Zhao, Y., Electroconductive and Anisotropic Structural Color Hydrogels for Visual Heart-on-a-Chip Construction. Adv. Sci. 2022, 2105777. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202105777 under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Pouriya Bayat