Chinese-Noodle-Inspired Muscle Myofiber Fabrication

Much effort has been made to engineer artificial fiber-shaped cellular constructs that can be potentially used as muscle fibers or blood vessels. However, existing microfiber-based approaches for culturing cells are still limited to 2D systems, compatible with a restricted number of polymers (e.g., alginate) and always lacking in situ mechanical stimulation. Here, a simple, facile, and high-throughput technique is reported to fabricate 3D cell-laden hydrogel microfibers (named hydrogel noodles), inspired by the fabrication approach for Chinese Hele noodle. A magnetically actuated and noncontact method to apply tensile stretch on hydrogel noodles has also been developed. With this method, it is found that cellular strain-threshold and saturation behaviors in hydrogel noodles differ substantially from their 2D analogs, including proliferation, spreading, and alignment. Moreover, it is shown that these cell-laden microfibers can induce muscle myofiber formation by tensile stretching alone. This easily adaptable platform holds great potential for the creation of functional tissue constructs and probing mechanobiology in three dimensions.