| Summary: | Electrospray techniques have become established in the life sciences for uses from cell encapsulation (Chang, 1964) to directed cell placement in more recent times (Jayasinghe et al., 2006a). During electrostatic encapsulation a conducting fluid in a needle connected to a high voltage power supply is charged and then drawn towards a grounded electrode by an electric field resulting in spraying. Cells and other materials can be encapsulated by suspending them in an alginate solution and electrospraying directly into a solution containing of a crosslinking agent, most commonly calcium chloride. This technique can be used to directly process and encapsulate many different types of materials (Jayasinghe and Townsend-Nicholson, 2006, Jayasinghe, 2007, Patel et al., 2008). This research adapts this technology further and progresses it by creating structures with multiple layers over an extended period with fluorescent markers contained within the layers, which are created through chemical adsorption. This allows the encoding information for the use in combinatorial stem cell biology where instead of individual experiments a large number of permutations are explored simultaneously. The research covers various parameters governing the encapsulation and layering processes as well as the biological functionality and integration as a tool for combinatorial stem cell cultures. The novel encapsulation and encoding technique presented here has a number of advantages over the currently available technology and has been filed as patent PCT/EP2010/006459.
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