Hydrogels: Mosaic Hydrogels: One‐Step Formation of Multiscale Soft Materials (Adv. Mater. 27/2012)

A one-step, continuous formation of mosaic hydrogels is described by A. Günther and coworkers on page 3650. A multilayer microfluidic platform enables a secondary biopolymer to be dynamically incorporated within a flowing biopolymer sheet prior to cross-linking. Stacked or tubular mosaic hydrogel assemblies with millimeter to centimeter length scales are created, as well as tesselations with locally varying composition, and primary cells could be incorporated. In addition, information may be stored and recorded.