3D-Printed Corals Could Save Coral Reefs and Help with Energy Production

"Most of these cells will die if we were to use traditional extrusion-based or inkjet processes because these methods take hours. It would be like keeping a fish out of the water; the cells that we work with won’t survive if kept too long out of their culture media. Our process is high throughput and offers really fast printing speeds, so it’s compatible with human cells, animal cells, and even algae cells in this case," said co-senior author Professor Shaochen Chen, from UC San Diego. 

Scanning living corals

The team used optical coherence tomography to scan living corals and recreate them into 3D printed designs. The 3D bioprinter was custom-made by the researchers and utilized light in order to print coral micro-scale structures in seconds.

"By copying the host microhabitat, we can also use our 3D bio-printed corals as a model system for the coral-algal symbiosis, which is urgently needed to understand the breakdown of the symbiosis during coral reef decline," said Wangpraseurt.

The researchers now argue that there are many applications to their new technology.

"We have recently created a company, called mantaz, that uses coral-inspired light-harvesting approaches to cultivate algae for bioproducts in developing countries. We hope that our technique will be scalable so it can have a real impact on the algal bio sector and ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for coral reef death," concluded Wangpraseurt.