Formation of 3D tissues of primary hepatocytes using fibrillized collagen microparticles as intercellular binders.

Numerous attempts have been made to organize isolated primary hepatocytes into functional three-dimensional (3D) constructs, but technologies to introduce extracellular matrix (ECM) components into such assemblies have not been fully developed. Here we report a new approach to forming hepatocyte-based 3D tissues using fibrillized collagen microparticles (F-CMPs) as intercellular binders. We created thick tissues with a thickness of ∼200 μm simply by mixing F-CMPs with isolated primary rat hepatocytes and culturing them in cell culture inserts.

A numbering-up strategy of hydrodynamic microfluidic filters for continuous-flow high-throughput cell sorting.

Even though a number of microfluidic systems for particle/cell sorting have been proposed, facile and versatile platforms that provide sufficient sorting throughput and good operability are still under development. Here we present a simple but effective numbering-up strategy to dramatically increase the throughput of a continuous-flow particle/cell sorting scheme based on hydrodynamic filtration (HDF). A microfluidic channel equipped with multiple branches has been employed as a unit structure for size-based filtration, which realizes precise sorting without necessitating sheath flows.