3DPrinters have slowly become more commonplace as they become cheaper and smaller. Makerspaces and libraries have made them more accessible for the average consumer to use, normally to print something small and made only of single colored plastic. 3Dprinters have become prominent in many fields, most notably, tissue engineering. My research focused on 3Dinkjet printers, which unlike most 3Dprinters use a liquid ink, not a plastic. This allowed me to use the 3Dprinter to create a specific shape while keeping the final product soft enough to resemble tissues and support cell growth. The bioink was made with a polymer called hyaluronic acid (HA) which is a key component of extracellular matrices for supporting muscle structure.

Nanostructures are constructed from carbon nanotubes as well as small nanoparticles on the scale of 0.000 000 001 meters. In recent years, DNA has come to be used in nanotechnology as a structural base material. DNA is prized in this regard for its unique property of Watson-Crick complementary base pairing. This natural process can be exploited to allow for the self-assembly of segments of DNA. Base pairing itself is an extremely primitive example of self-assembly. Because DNA naturally uses this process to form many different shapes, it is a very pliable material that is easily shaped simply by altering nucleotide sequences. Thus, self-assembly of DNA is cheaper, easier, and more desirable than physical manipulation…..