Interaction of Epithelial Cells with Surfaces and Surfaces Decorated by Molecules

TL;DR

This paper explores how different surface properties and patterned molecular coatings influence epithelial cell adhesion and migration, introducing a novel lithographic method for creating chemically distinct, nanoscale patterns.

Contribution

It presents Polymer Blend Lithography (PBL), a new self-organization based technique for fabricating chemically functionalized nanoscale patterns on substrates.

Findings

Surface material composition affects cell migration velocity.

Surface stiffness and energy influence cell adhesion.

PBL enables scalable, high-contrast chemical patterning at sub-100 nm scale.

Abstract

A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they form is one of their main functions. It is governed by the properties of the networks forming the cytoskeleton systems and by cell-to-cell contacts. Different substrates with varying surface properties modify the migration velocity of the cells. On the one hand one can change the materials composition. Organic and inorganic materials induce differing migration velocities in the same cell system. Within the same class of materials, a change of the surface stiffness or of the surface energy modifies the migration velocity, too. For our cell adhesion studies a variety of different, homogeneous substrates were used (polymers, bio-polymers, metals, oxides). In addition, an effective lithographic method, Polymer Blend Lithography (PBL), is reported, to produce patterned Self-Assembled Monolayers (SAM) on solid substrates featuring two or three different chemical functionalities. This we achieve without the use of conventional lithography like e-beam or UV lithography, only by using self-organization. These surfaces are decorated with a Teflon-like and with an amino-functionalized molecular layer. The resulting pattern is a copy of a previously created self-organized polymer pattern, featuring a scalable lateral domain size in the sub-micron range down below 100 nanometers. The resulting monolayer pattern features a high chemical and biofunctional contrast with feature sizes in the range of cell adhesion complexes like e.g. focal adhesion points.