Programmed Fabrication of Vesicle-Based Prototissue Fibers with Modular Functionalities

Multicellular organisms have hierarchical structures where multiple cells collectively form tissues with complex 3D architectures and exhibit higher-order functions. Inspired by this, to date, multiple protocell models have been assembled to form tissue-like structures termed prototissues. Despite recent advances in this research area, the programmed assembly of protocells into prototissue fibers with emergent functions still represents a significant challenge. The possibility of assembling prototissue fibers would open up a way to a novel type of prototissue subunit capable of hierarchical assembly into unprecedented soft functional materials with tunable architectures, modular and distributed functionalities. Herein, we devise the first method to fabricate free-standing vesicle-based prototissue fibers with controlled lengths and diameters. Importantly, we also show that the fibers can be composed of different specialized modules that, for example, can endow the fiber with magnetotaxis capabilities, or that can work synergistically to take an input diffusible chemical signals and transduce it into a readable fluorescent output through a hosted enzyme cascade reaction. Overall, our research addresses an important challenge of prototissue engineering and will find important applications in soft robotics, 3D bio-printing, microbioreactor technologies, and flow chemistry.