Anisotropic textured surfaces allow water striders to walk on water, butterflies to shed water from their wings and plants to trap insects and pollen. Capturing these natural features in biomimetic surfaces is an active area of research. Here, we report an engineered nanofilm, composed of an array of poly(p-xylylene) nanorods, which demonstrates anisotropic wetting behaviour by means of a pin-release droplet ratchet mechanism. Droplet retention forces in the pin and release directions differ by up to 80 μN, which is over ten times greater than the values reported for other engineered anisotropic surfaces. The nanofilm provides a microscale smooth surface on which to transport microlitre droplets, and is also relatively easy to synthesize by a bottom-up vapour-phase technique. An accompanying comprehensive model successfully describes the film's anisotropic wetting behaviour as a function of measurable film morphology parameters.

Teaser Recent advances in tissue engineering have enabled the development of microscale biomimetic ‘organ on a chip’ tissue models which have the potential to make an important impact on the various stages of drug discovery and toxicity testing. Developing biologically relevant models of human tissues and organs is an important enabling step for disease modeling and drug discovery. Recent advances in tissue engineering, biomaterials and microfluidics have led to the development of microscale functional units of such models also referred to as ‘organs on a chip’. In this review, we provide an overview of key enabling technologies and highlight the wealth of recent work regarding on-chip tissue models. In addition, we discuss the current challenges and future directions of organ-on-chip development.

During tissue morphogenesis and homeostasis, cells experience various signals in their environments, including gradients of physical and chemical cues. Spatial and temporal gradients regulate various cell behaviours such as proliferation, migration, and differentiation during development, inflammation, wound healing, and cancer. One of the goals of functional tissue engineering is to create microenvironments that mimic the cellular and tissue complexity found in vivo by incorporating physical, chemical, temporal, and spatial gradients within engineered three-dimensional (3D) scaffolds. Hydrogels are ideal materials for 3D tissue scaffolds that mimic the extracellular matrix (ECM). Various techniques from material science, microscale engineering, and microfluidics are used to synthesise biomimetic hydrogels with encapsulated cells and tailored microenvironments. In particular, a host of methods exist to incorporate micrometer to centimetre scale chemical and physical gradients within hydrogels to mimic the cellular cues found in vivo. In this review, we draw on specific biological examples to motivate hydrogel gradients as tools for studying cell–material interactions. We provide a brief overview of techniques to generate gradient hydrogels and showcase their use to study particular cell behaviours in two-dimensional (2D) and 3D environments. We conclude by summarizing the current and future trends in gradient hydrogels and cell–material interactions in context with the long-term goals of tissue engineering.

In Nature, directional surfaces on insect cuticle, animal fur, bird feathers, and plant leaves are comprised of dual micro-nanoscale features that tune roughness and surface energy. This feature article summarizes experimental and theoretical approaches for the design, synthesis and characterization of new bioinspired surfaces demonstrating unidirectional surface properties. The experimental approaches focus on bottom-up and top-down synthesis methods of unidirectional micro- and nanoscale films to explore and characterize their anomalous features. The theoretical component of the review focuses on computational tools to predict the physicochemical properties of unidirectional surfaces.

We study the late time evolution of a class of exact anisotropic cosmological solutions of Einstein's equations, namely spatially homogeneous cosmologies of Bianchi type VII 0 with a perfect fluid source. We show that, in contrast to models of Bianchi type VII h which are asymptotically self-similar at late times, Bianchi VII 0 models undergo a complicated type of self-similarity breaking. This symmetry breaking affects the late time isotropization that occurs in these models in a significant way: if the equation of state parameter γ satisfies γ ≤ 4 3 the models isotropize as regards the shear but not as regards the Weyl curvature. Indeed these models exhibit a new dynamical feature that we refer to as Weyl curvature dominance: the Weyl curvature dominates the dynamics at late times. By viewing the evolution from a dynamical systems perspective we show that, despite the special nature of the class of models under consideration, this behaviour has implications for more general models.

Cell-laden hydrogels show great promise for creating engineered tissues. However, a major shortcoming with these systems has been the inability to fabricate structures with controlled microscale features on a biologically relevant length scale. Here we demonstrate a rapid method for creating centimeter-scale, cell-laden hydrogels through the assembly of shape-controlled microgels. This was achieved by using an approach that uses the liquid-air interface of a hydrophobic solution to drive the assembly of microgels. Cell-laden microgels of specific shapes were randomly placed on the surface of a high density, hydrophobic solution and induced to aggregate and were subsequently crosslinked into macroscale tissue-like structures. The resultant assemblies were cell-laden hydrogel sheets consisting of tightly-packed ordered microgel units. In addition, a hierarchical approach created complex multi-gel building blocks which were then assembled into tissues with precise spatial control over the cell distribution. These data demonstrate that forces at an air-liquid interface can be used to self-assemble spatially controllable, co-cultured tissue-like structures.

Natural materials exhibit anisotropy with variations in soluble factors, cell distribution, and matrix properties. The ability to recreate the heterogeneity of the natural materials is a major challenge for investigating cell-material interactions and for developing biomimetic materials. Here we present a generic fluidic approach using convection and alternating flow to rapidly generate multi-centimeter gradients of biomolecules, polymers, beads and cells and cross-gradients of two species in a microchannel. Accompanying theoretical estimates and simulations of gradient growth provide design criteria over a range of material properties. A poly(ethyleneglycol) hydrogel gradient, a porous collagen gradient and a composite material with a hyaluronic acid/gelatin cross-gradient were generated with continuous variations in material properties and in their ability to regulate cellular response. This simple yet generic fluidic platform should prove useful for creating anisotropic biomimetic materials and high-throughput platforms for investigating cell-microenvironment interaction.

The ability to rapidly generate concentration gradients of diffusible molecules has important applications in many chemical and biological studies. Here we established spatially and temporally controllable concentration gradients of molecules (i.e. proteins or toxins) in a portable microfluidic device in an easy and rapid manner. The formation of the concentration gradients was initiated by a passive-pump-induced forward flow and further optimized during an evaporation-induced backward flow. The centimeter-length gradients along the microfluidic channel were shown to be spatially and temporally controlled by the backward flow. The gradient profile was stabilized by stopping the flow. Computational simulations of this dynamic process illustrated the combined effects of convection and diffusion on the gradient generation, and fit well with the experimental data. To demonstrate the applications of this methodology, a stabilized concentration gradient of a cardiac toxin, Alphacypermethrin, along the microchannel was used to test the response of HL-1 cardiac cells in the micro-device, which correlated with toxicity data obtained from multi-well plates. The approach presented here may be useful for many biological and chemical processes that require rapid generation of long-range gradient in a portable microfluidic device.