Control of cell adhesion, migration, and orientation on photochemically microprocessed surfaces.

Abstract

Using surface-photochemistry-driven microprocessing, striped patterns of cell-adhesive and nonadhesive domains were prepared on tissue-culture dishes. The width of striped patterns ranged from 20 to 130 microns. When endothelial cells were cultured on such dimensionally well-defined surfaces, cells adhered, migrated, and proliferated only on cell-adhesive domains. Migration potentials such as tracks of moving cells and migration rates were determined using a time-lapse video recording apparatus under a phase-contrast microscope and a computer-assisted image analyzer. The migration track in the direction of the width of the stripe-pattern was limited to the size of the width, and effective migratory distance over 400 min of observation was considerably reduced, to almost half that for a nontreated surface, whereas migratory rate was not changed by surface processing, irrespective of the stripe-pattern width. After a 2-day culture, oriented patterned cellular sheets were obtained. Cells were elongated and aligned along the axis of the striped pattern. The degrees of orientation and elongation were enhanced with a decrease of the line width. At the narrowest surface domain, cells only migrated back and forth, and eventually they became highly elongated and oriented along the axis of the domain. These results indicated that the adhesion area, migrating direction, and orientation of cells can be controlled by this method with micron-order precision. This method provides quantitative information on the kinetics of the migration process and the morphogenesis of the microprocessed surface.