Abstract
Understanding cellular interactions with material surfaces at the micro‐ and nanometer scale is essential for the development of the next generation of biomaterials. Several techniques have been used to create micro‐ and nanopatterned surfaces as a means of studying cellular interactions with a surface. Herein, we report the novel use of interference lithography to create a large (4 cm2) array of 33 nm deep channels in a gold surface, to expose an antireflective coating on a silicon wafer at the bottom of the gold channels. The fabricated pores had a diameter of 140–350 nm separated by an average pitch of 304–750 nm, depending on the fabrication conditions. The gold surface was treated with 2‐(2‐(2‐(11‐mercaptoundecyloxy)ethoxy)ethoxy)ethanol to create protein‐resistant areas. Fibronectin was selectively adsorbed onto the exposed antireflective coating creating nanometer‐scale cell adhesive domains. A murine osteoblast cell line (MC3T3‐E1) was seeded onto the surfaces and was shown to attach to the fibronectin domains and spread across the material surface.
Highlights
Cellular adhesion is an important process in many biological phenomena such as embryonic development, homeostasis, and pathogenesis
Cells have micrometer dimensions, in vivo they are in close contact with the extracellular matrix (ECM), a substratum with topographical and chemical features of nanometer sizes [1]
Advances in material science and imaging technologies have led to the understanding that individual cell-material interactions begin with the attachment of a cell surface integrin receptor to a nano-scale peptide sequence found within ECM proteins
Summary
Cellular adhesion is an important process in many biological phenomena such as embryonic development, homeostasis, and pathogenesis. The micrometer- and nanometer-scale organization of surface proteins is expected to play a critical role in adhesion complex formation and function [3,4,5,6,7]. Seminal work in the area of cell adhesion studies in Whitesides’ laboratory patterned cell adhesive domains on the cellular scale (10s of microns), demonstrating that by controlling the shape and size of the adhesive domain, the shape and degree of physical interaction between the surface and the cell could be controlled [8,9,10,11]. Cell adhesion and cellular organization has been studied extensively on micrometerscale patterns [12,13,14,15,16,17]. Studies of the influence of protein organization at the nanometer-scale have been limited due to a lack of a flexible, high-resolution submicron scale patterning technique that is capable of producing large enough patterned surfaces to examine a statistically relevant cell number [2]
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