英语科普小知识 3D打印机可打造合成组织.docVIP

A custom-built programmable 3D printer can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues, Oxford University scientists have demonstrated. The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. ? These printed droplet networks could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues -- such as those that use stem cells. ? The team report their findings in this weeks Science. ? We arent trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues, said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford Universitys Department of Chemistry, who led the research. Weve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other. ? Each droplet is an?aqueous（水般的）?compartment about 50 microns in diameter. Although this is around five times larger than living cells the researchers believe there is no reason why they could not be made smaller. The networks remain stable for weeks. ? Conventional 3D printers arent up to the job of creating these droplet networks, so we custom built one in our Oxford lab to do it, said Professor Bayley. At the moment weve created networks of up to 35,000 droplets but the size of network we can make is really only limited by time and money. For our experiments we used two different types of droplet, but theres no reason why you couldnt use 5