The ability to place living organisms with functional materials in desired 3D spaces can have numerous uses in areas such as cryopreservation, disease research, development of therapies, and the creation of organism-based devices. This involves continuously assessing the locations of randomly oriented living and moving organisms so they can be collected and transferred to desired 3D spaces without damage in a high-throughput manner, as well as interweaving functional materials with the organisms. Humans can perform these functions but have inconsistent levels of accuracy and are not able to handle hazardous materials. To overcome these barriers, we developed a multi-nozzle 3D printing system that can see and judge living and moving organisms and place them with functional materials in 3D spaces. We first developed vacuum-assisted nozzles for printing single and multiple organisms, which act as human hands and provide advancements in controllability. The multi-nozzle 3D printing system was enhanced by the integration of vision and laser systems, which act as human eyes and enable the printer to continuously adapt to newly updated information about randomly oriented organisms and target spaces. We demonstrated through examples that 3D printing of organisms with functional materials can enhance the throughput of organism cryopreservation and organism-related studies and enable novel study designs and devices with organisms. We envision that our 3D printing method of organisms can impact current and future organism-associated research and applications.

3D printing of organisms for biotechnology, biomedicine, and devices

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.