Harnessing the Manipulation of Single Cells to Construct Biological Structures: Tools and Applications

Abstract

Artificial biological structures hold the promise for modeling cellular assembly in vitro and have advanced considerable studies in cell biology, disease modeling, drug testing, and regenerative medicine. Biological functions are derived from micro- and macroscale interactions of various cell types, and a structural property matching the tissue in vivo is required to enable precision biological function. Despite various types of tissues and organs are successfully constructed by conventional biofabrication technologies, they mostly only show a small fraction of structural features found in real tissues. Tools for single-cell manipulation provide the approach to fabricate artificial tissues cell-by-cell, and have enabled the construction of biological structures with single-cell and heterogeneous features, recapitulating the complexity in vivo. This review presents a comprehensive overview of the construction of biological structures through manipulating single cells, covering single-cell technologies with operation principles and main advances, biological structures associated with informative explanations of single-cell manipulation during construction, and representative applications mainly focusing on analysis and modeling. Current challenges and future perspectives in this field are also discussed.