Patterning of a Drying Emulsion Film.

Stabilizing layers of colloidal dispersions or emulsions to obtain homogeneous films is a real challenge. We describe here a new kind of instability in drying films of emulsions: during evaporation of the internal phase, cracks appear between the droplets that create aggregates according to a regular pattern. We show that this pattern only appears if the emulsion is adhesive, i.

Microfibrillated cellulose sheets coating oxygen-permeable PDMS membranes induce rat hepatocytes 3D aggregation into stably-attached 3D hemispheroids.

Here we report the use of natural, chemically-unmodified, microfibrillated cellulose (MFC) as a matrix for hepatocyte culture. We developed an original cell-culture design composed of a thin 3D-microstructured fibrous substrate consisting of a MFC sheet coating a highly O(2)-permeable polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membrane. The MFC-coated PDMS membranes were obtained according to a simple process where cellulose fibres were deposited from an aqueous suspension on the PDMS surfaces and the films were dried under mild conditions.