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Decades of research in the field of tissue engineering have allowed important findings to control cellular behaviors in the lab by designing artificial scaffolds. However, it is still challenging to engineer tissues (i.e. cell collectives with specific functions) that have intrinsic functions equivalent to those in our body. One key element in building such advanced functional tissues is the understanding of structure-cellular function correlations. Specifically, helical structures are seen in many of the tissues in our body, such as the helical structure of skeletal muscle fibers. Yet, no research has investigated the effects of helical structure on cell or tissue level functions due to the lack of technologies to design such helical scaffolds. Herein, we utilized a novel class of helical light field, referred to as an optical vortex, to realize the fabrication of helical scaffolds. By implementing the optical vortex in the photopolymerization of a biocompatible poly(ethylene glycol diacrylate) (PEGDA) scaffold, we expected that the orbital angular momentum of the optical vortex would transfer the helical structure on the fabricated PEGDA gels. Adopting the photo-initiated radical polymerization chemistry, we successfully created PEGDA gels using the optical vortex via single photon and two photon absorption. Although further characterizations are necessary, the helical PEGDA gels fabricated in this study will potentially provide a novel means to investigate how the helical structures affect cellular and tissue-level functions.
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