Team:TU Delft/Hardware
Hardware Title
Subtitle
Overview
The Biolinker - a DIY biofilm printer
We built a functional prototype of a 3D printer, our Biolinker, from cheap DIY open source parts, which is capable of bioprinting bacteria in shapes based on lines and circles. The bioink is made out of our engineered bacterial cells, which we successfully immobilized into a gel. With this bioink we can print lines with a resolution (thickness) of down to 1 mm. We were able to successfully print and image of up to 4 layers of bioink with only little mixing between the layers. Although redissolving jellified alginate becomes more challenging with size, our bacterial cells were able to survive under alginate dissolving conditions for 24 hours.
Since the 1980s numerous applications and materials have been developed for 3D printing. Nowadays, starting from a computer generated three dimensional image file (stereolithography .STL) metals, plastics or even food can be printed in any shape imaginable. Recently, significant progress has been made in the three dimensional printing of mammalian stem cells towards creating artificial organs with many renowned research groups all around the world working on this. Since 3D bioprinting has high potential and is still largely unexplored, we set out to find a novel application. Inspired by machine-specific properties: precision and reproducibility, we came up with the idea to print cells in a structurally defined pattern. In this way we intend to meet the increasing demand of reliable product testing in medicine and health applications.
In the following pages, we describe the development and the printing conditions of our prototype.
Making 3D Biofilms
Biolinker: From 3D printer to a Biological System
Normal 3D printers generally follow the same principle: raw material is transferred into liquid state by melting, or utilization of a fine powder, to obtain high precision upon deposition of the material. At this point the material needs to form a stable, solid structure,by cooling it, or using UV light that chemically solidifies the compound.
Based on 3D printer general principles, we identified the following design requirements for the Biolinker:
- Liquid bioink
- Curing reaction to form a supporting scaffold
- Removable scaffold to obtain the final bacterial structure
- Cells need to survive every step of the entire process
- Sterile environment needs to be maintained at all time
From these points, we came up with a six step process to make a 3D biofilm!
How we print bacteria in 3D
Step 1: The first step already determines the outcome printing quality. The bioink needs to be deposited at the exact right spot to print a structure with high precision. Firstly, this depends on the precision of the motors moving the printhead across the stage. Secondly, it depends on the bioink itself. Its viscosity, flow rate and surface tension. Finally, the adhesive properties of the surface (in the following referred to as biopaper) upon which the material is deposited determine the outcome.
The Biolinker
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Design and Integration
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DIY Manuals
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Protocols
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