报告题目:

Using plant proteins as ink materials to develop composite scaffolds via electrohydrodynamic printing for biomedical applications

报告人:

Jing Linzhi

所在单位:

National University of Singapore Suzhou Research Institute

Biography:

Jing Linzhi, Associate Investigator, Peak Of Excellent-Center Of Health and Food Tech, National University of Singapore Suzhou Research Institute (NUSRI). I received my bachelor's degree of material science and engineering at Suzhou University in 2014 and received a Mater degree of Chemistry and Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore in 2015 and 2021. My Ph.D. work focuses on develop novel plant protein based ink materials for electrohydrodynamic printing technology and fabricate fibrous scaffolds with diverse morphology for 3D cell culture, drug screening and tissue engineering applications. After joining in NUSRI in 2021, my research interest is to develop plant derived edible scaffolds via 3D printing for cell-based meat. 

Abstract：

Electrohydrodynamic printing (EHDP) technique, has recently attracted extensive interests as a powerful tool to fabricate from micro to nanoscale hierarchical fibrous scaffolds in a custom-tailored manner for drug discovery and tissue engineering applications. It uses viscous polymer fluid as ‘ink’ to produce ultrafine fiber under applied voltage. At present, only a few synthetic biopolymer inks such as polycaprolactone (PCL), polyethylene oxide (PEO) has been extensively used in EHDP technique, and the printed scaffolds suffered from low mechanical strength, biocompatibility and biodegradability, which hinders its widespread downstream applications.

In this study, we introduce novel plant-derived cereal prolamin proteins such as zein and gliadin from corn and wheat as ink materials to fabricate microscale fibrous scaffolds via EHDP technique. Our findings suggest incorporating zein into PCL could significantly improve the mechanical strength, biodegradability and biocompatibility of printed scaffolds. Gliadin can be used as sacrificing material to produce nanoscale porous structure on the microfiber surface of printed PCL/gliadin scaffolds, which exhibits improved cell-scaffolds interactions in vitro. Furthermore, we synthesize a small molecular near infrared region II (NIR-II) dye and fabricate NIR-II fluorescence active PCL scaffolds, which are implanted under mouse skin and can be non-invasively imaged via NIR-II image. The developed scaffolds show great potential in 3D cell culture, tissue engineering, drug screening and cell-based meat applications.