Growth and site-specific organization of micron-scale biomolecular devices on living mammalian cells

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the integration of synthetic micro-scale filaments and DNA nanotubes onto mammalian cell surfaces, enabling shear stress measurement and dynamic cellular components, advancing cell surface engineering and biosensing capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a method to precisely anchor synthetic biomolecular structures on living cells, maintaining their organization during cellular activity, which was previously challenging.

Findings

Nanotubes act as shear stress sensors, measuring 0-2 dyn/cm².

Anchored nanotubes can grow dynamically on cell surfaces.

The approach enables organized cell surface engineering with synthetic structures.

Abstract

Mesoscale molecular assemblies on the cell surface, such as cilia and filopodia, integrate information, control transport and amplify signals. Synthetic devices mimicking these structures could sensitively monitor these cellular functions and direct new ones. The challenges in creating such devices, however are that they must be integrated with cells in a precise kinetically controlled process and a device's structure and its precisely structured cell interface must then be maintained during active cellular function. Here we report the ability to integrate synthetic micro-scale filaments, DNA nanotubes, into a cell's architecture by anchoring them by their ends to specific receptors on the surfaces of mammalian cells. These filaments can act as shear stress meters: how anchored nanotubes bend at the cell surface quantitatively indicates the magnitude of shear stresses between 0-2 dyn per cm2, a regime important for cell signaling. Nanotubes can also grow while anchored to cells, thus acting as dynamic components of cells. This approach to cell surface engineering, in which synthetic biomolecular assemblies are organized within existing cellular architecture, could make it possible to build new types of sensors, machines and scaffolds that can interface with, control and measure properties of cells.