I’ve thought Bioprinting was a great idea ever since I heard about it from Organovo. Now it seems some hackers are bringing bioprinting to the DIY movement. It’s amazing how fast these hi-tech machines are getting translated into something that anyone can own and use.

According to Wired, here are some of the possible uses for a bioprinter:

• Print gradients of nutrients and/or antibiotics on a layer of cells to study combinatorial interactions — or even to select different isolates from an environmental sample.
• Print patterns of growth factors on a layer of eukaryotic cells to study cell differentiation.
• Print two or more microbial species at different distances from each other, to study metabolic interactions.
• Set up a computational problem as a 2-D pattern of engineered microbes on an agar plate.
• Study Reaction-Diffusion systems.
• Print 3-D structures by over-printing layers using the inkjet head. Now you can consider doing all the above in 3-D!
• Print cell in a sodium alginate solution, onto a surface soaked in calcium chloride, to build up 3D gel structures (similar to spherification process in Molecular Gastronomy )