Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ARTIST (Artificial cell-cell interactions for light switchable cell organization and signaling)
Período documentado: 2021-05-01 hasta 2022-10-31
The idea of using cells to build up tissues from the bottom-up is a very promising yet highly challenging approach to tissue engineer. Analogous to Lego, which allows building complex structures, the bottom-up approach to tissue engineering aims to build tissues of any desired structure and function from different cell types cell by cell. The challenge lies in controlling the interactions between the cells, which determine how they organize with respect to each other, how they work together and consequently whether such a multicellular architecture will be functional. In this project, we regulate cell-cell interactions of cells of the same and different types with visible light using optogenetics. These photoswitchable cell-cell interactions provide sustainable, non-invasive, dynamic and reversible control over cell-cell interactions. Most importantly, the control of the cell-cell interactions with light allows us to control where and when cells interact as we can precisely control where and when we illuminate. Moreover, combining different photoswitchable cell-cell interactions allows building tissue-like structures with various substructures out of different cell types. Ultimately, this will pave the way for the bottom-up assembly of multicellular architectures with predictable and programmable organization as well as regulate how cells work together within a tissue.
For the first time, we are able to control the interaction between two different cell types for the first time with visible light. These photoswitchable cell-cell interactions provide unprecedented spatiotemporal control over these interactions and allow us to build a layer by layer tissue structure. Different photoswitchable cell-cell interactions offer varying dynamics over the interaction between cells, which determines if compact ball-like assemblies under thermodynamic control or lose assemblies that resemble snowflakes under kinetic control form. Using photoswitchable cell-cell interactions it is possible to control these dynamics and how cell self-assemble and self-sort into multicellular, which parallels principles of self-assembly known for non-living colloids.
We aim to build tissue-like structures out of multiple cell types with precise organization and function. The photoswitchable cell-cell interactions are also a great way to answer key questions in biological processes where cell-cell interactions play a pivotal role in such as embryogenesis, cancer progression and tissue development.