Dr. Xinna Wang's Seminar on Engineering Soluble Factor Gradients and Beyond
Dr. Xinna Wang gave a seminar on Sep 3, 2025. Her topic was on “Engineering Soluble Factor Gradients and Beyond”.
Abstract:
Soluble factors such as morphogens are normally sequestered by the extracellular matrix to form concentration gradients after their secretion. Such soluble factor concentration gradients function on the targeting cells to regulate symmetry breaking and polarity establishment in early development, as well as chemotaxis in immunological response, in a spatiotemporally controlled manner. Traditional tools, including globally applying soluble factors to the culture media and in vivo models, have been widely used to study the biological effects of the soluble factors. However, the intrinsic problems of these models, such as bulk stimulation and lack of spatial information in “dish-average” case or the difficulties to decouple other variables and poor tunability in in vivo environment, highly limited the fidelity of the results. Micropatterning technology is an engineering manipulation that can readily spatially and quantitatively control the location, shape and local density of the molecules to be patterned on the surface of the substratum, thereby enabling one to reconstitute the spatial information of, as well as the concentration gradient of the soluble factors of interest. The current talk will introduce (1) the development of engineering the soluble factor gradients via Multiphoton Microfabrication and Micropatterning (MMM) technology, an advanced laser-printing system that can fabricate bulk structures and functionalize the surface of these structures with bioactive molecules in one go; (2) the exemplified applications of the MMM-engineered soluble factor gradients at cellular level; and (3) the future directions of using other printing systems such as ultrasound-based platform to engineering the soluble factor gradients for studies at tissue level.
Learn more about our multiphoton microfabrication and micropatterning (MMM) technology here.