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Towards artificial muscles: the contribution of liquid crystals

UNIFI research published in Advanced Healthcare Materials

A group of researchers from the University of Florence (UNIFI) has proved, for the first time, that plastic material produced from common liquid crystals and called liquid crystal polymers are able to direct an orderly growth of muscle cells. This represents an important first step toward in-vitro development of muscle tissues that could be used, in the foreseeable future, to replace damaged tissues.

The study, recently appeared in su Advanced Healthcare Materials (“Liquid Crystal‐Induced Myoblast Alignment”, DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201801489) was carried out by a team of UNIFI (Department of Chemistry, LENS – European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy – Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Biomedical, Experimental and Clinical Sciences), together with the National Institute of Optics of the CNR (National Research Council), INRIM (National Institute of Metrological Research) and CSGI (Inter-university consortium for the development of large interphase systems).

 “The muscles of our body - explains Camilla Parmeggiani, a researcher at the Department of Chemistry and research coordinator - consist of fibres in turn composed of cells, called myoblasts, which grow in a certain direction so that they can merge and form a fabric capable of contracting. In the laboratory, however, cell cultures are normally grown on supports - the so-called Petri dishes, glass or plastic - that do not favour cell alignment: our study tries to overcome this problem by proposing the use of a new material that instead allows the alignment of the cells in culture.”

The experiments reveal, in fact, that the cells cultivated on these materials are structured in a direction that reflects the alignment of the molecules that make up the polymers. “This is the first example - concludes Parmeggiani - of how information ‘recorded’ in the material at the molecular level (the crystalline liquid order of molecules) can be ‘communicated’ to a cell culture thus influencing the morphology of the tissue it generates.” The technique used represents a step forward towards the effective realization of functional fabrics in the laboratory.

Publication
date
15 March 2019
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