The liver also makes bile in the digestive system. In medical vocabulary, the Latin prefix hepato- or hepatic is often used to describe the liver or liver. Most liver diseases have symptoms of jaundice, because the liver can't continue to excrete bilirubin, so it accumulates in the body.

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Blood-related functions: the liver is the main hematopoietic organ in the fetus, but it is replaced by bone marrow in adulthood, and the hematopoietic function stops, but it recovers in some pathological conditions. In addition, almost all coagulation factors are made by the liver. The liver plays an important role in the dynamic balance of human coagulation and anticoagulation systems. Therefore, the severity of liver injury is often parallel to the degree of coagulation dysfunction, and patients with liver failure often have severe bleeding.

Function of excreting and excreting bile: The liver produces about one liter of bile within 24 hours, which is transported to the gallbladder through the bile duct. Gallbladder has the function of concentrating and excreting bile to promote the digestion and absorption of fat by small intestine.

In order to prepare a tissue-engineered liver that can be implanted into the body and achieve the ultimate goal of realizing all the functions of the liver and permanently replacing the liver of patients with severe liver diseases, scientists have done a lot of research in the field of liver tissue engineering. At present, the research of liver tissue engineering mainly focuses on the construction of seed cells, extracellular matrix materials (three-dimensional scaffold materials) and liver tissue structure and growth and development microenvironment.

Regarding the construction of liver tissue structure, Auth et al. cultured human bile duct epithelial cells on extracellular matrix materials to form bile duct-like structure; Kim et al. cultured endothelial cells and hepatocytes can better maintain the function of hepatocytes; Sakai et al. used pre-cultured fibroblasts as feeder layer to rapidly prepare hepatocytes lamellar tissue with limited proliferation potential, which can be used for highly specific cell transplantation. Our HE staining results show that the embryonic hepatocytes of 15d mice can be guided to form vascular structure and liver tissue-like structure under the condition of three-dimensional scaffold culture in this experiment, which is different from the results of plane culture in vitro. Colony-like growth is common in plane culture of embryonic hepatocytes, and no vascular structure is formed.