According to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, researchers have developed the first-of-its-kind adaptive 3D printing system that detects the positions of randomly distributed organisms and safely moves them to specific locations for assembly. This autonomous technology will save researchers time and money in bioimaging, cybernetics, cryopreservation and devices that integrate living organisms.
The research paper, titled “3D-printed organisms enabled by aspiration-assisted adaptive strategies,” was published in Advanced Science and the researchers have filed a patent on the technology.
The system can track, collect and precisely position insects and other organisms whether they are at rest, in droplets or in motion. The pick-and-place method, guided by real-time visual and spatial data, adapts and can ensure precise placement of the organisms.
“The printer itself can behave like a human, with the printer acting as the hands, the machine vision system as the eyes and the computer as the brain,” said Guebum Han, a former postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the paper. “The printer can adapt to moving or stationary organisms in real time and assemble them in a specific arrangement or pattern.”
Typically, this process is done manually and requires extensive training, which can lead to inconsistencies in organism-based applications. This new type of system reduces the time required by researchers and produces more consistent results.
This technology could increase the number of organisms processed for cryopreservation, separate living organisms from dead ones, place organisms on curved surfaces, and integrate organisms with materials and devices in customizable shapes. It could also lay the foundation for creating complex organism arrangements, such as superorganism hierarchies – organized structures found in insect colonies such as ants and bees. In addition, the research could lead to advances in autonomous bioproduction by enabling the assessment and assembly of organisms.
For example, this system was used to improve cryopreservation methods for zebrafish embryos, which were previously performed through manual manipulation. Using this new technology, researchers were able to show that the process could be completed 12 times faster compared to the manual method. Another example shows how the adaptive strategy tracked, picked up and placed randomly moving beetles and integrated them into functional devices.
In the future, researchers hope to further develop this technology and combine it with robotics to make it portable for field research, allowing researchers to collect organisms or samples in areas that would normally be inaccessible.
The work was conducted in collaboration with the Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio) and was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and Regenerative Medicine Minnesota.
