MYOFORCE · Control of myotube growth for the generation of synthetic muscular micro-actuators
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-09-01 → 2025-12-31
- EU contribution
- €188,037
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Control of myotube growth for the generation of synthetic muscular micro-actuators
Living tissues are remarkable materials. They can actively generate forces, adapt their shape, and reorganize themselves in response to internal and external cues. These properties play a central role in how organs form during development and how tissues remodel during health and disease. Yet, despite decades of research, there is still no clear framework to explain how collective cellular forces can be programmed to generate predictable tissue reshaping, which could be used in actuators at the microscale. The goal of this project was to understand and control how groups of cells generate internal mechanical stresses and how these stresses can be used to drive controlled shape transformations. The project was initially motivated by challenges in biohybrid robotics and soft actuation, where living cells are combined with artificial materials to create active systems. However, a broader motivation was to uncover general physical principles governing tissue morphogenesis for actuation in devices. The project explored whether cellular orientation and collective organization could be used as a design parameter to control internal stresses and shape changes in living tissues. By combining concepts from physics, biology, and materials science, the project aimed to establish a pathway toward programmable, self-shaping living materials, with potential relevance for bioengineering, morphogenesis research, and the design of adaptive materials.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Millions of years of natural evolution have refined cellular tissues into exceptionally sophisticated materials. Not only they present the widest spectrum of mechanical properties, but they also self-organize, generate forces at different scales, react to external stimuli, and self-heal. Exploiting the unique features of tissues to build biohybrid actuators is thus the new paradigm in soft robotics. Muscular (myo-) tissues, composed of myotubes, are highly contractile and have become the main choice for the design of biohybrid actuators, typically millimetric hydrogel objects embedding muscle cells. Importantly, due to a combination of factors, including a lack of control on myotube growth, poor integration of the myotubes with their environment, or slow nutrient perfusion, artificial muscular tissues have so far displayed significantly low efficiencies compared with natural muscle. Furthermore, current biohybrid actuators hinder both the characterization of myotubes’ architecture and the mapping of forces at the myotube scale. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach to prepare biohybrid actuators based on the control of myotube growth at the microscale. First, we propose a platform to grow myotubes with controlled size and shape, and to characterize their contractile behavior. By using this platform, I will be able to investigate the interplay between myotube architecture and force generation. Second, we propose a set of fine-tuned artificial scaffolds, which will guide myotube growth and self-integration, leading to active composites able to generate specific mechanical tasks. Finally, to tame the self-contractility of the active composites, optogenetically-modified myotubes will be incorporated, allowing external actuation with light. This proposal presents a novel experimental toolbox for controlling the shape of myotubes and mapping their forces at the micron scale, both key for designing efficient muscular micro-actuators.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101065794
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e509325ebd&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e52d4b5f6b&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union