Congrats to our group for publishing a paper in PNAS in which we developed a bottom-up approach to direct the assembly of cell-laden microgels to generate tissue constructs with tunable microarchitecture and complexity. This assembly process is driven by the tendency of multi-phase liquid-liquid systems to minimize the surface area and the resulting surface free energy between the phases. This bottom-up approach for the directed assembly of cell-laden microgels provides a powerful and highly scalable approach to form biomimetic 3D tissue constructs and opens a new paradigm for directing the assembly of mesoscale materials.
