Abstract
Engineered nanomaterials are often used in tissue engineering applications to influence and manipulate the behavior of cells. Recently, a number of tungsten-silicon oxide nanocomposite devices containing equal width (symmetric) tungsten and silicon oxide parallel line comb structures were developed and used by our group. The devices induced over 90% of seeded cells (Vero) to align within ±20° of the axes of 10 µm wide tungsten lines. Furthermore, a mathematical model was successfully developed to predict this alignment behavior and forecast the minimum width of isolated tungsten lines required to induce such behavior. However, the mechanism by which the widths of the symmetrical tungsten and silicon oxide lines induce the alignment behavior is still unknown. Furthermore, the model was never tested on more complex asymmetrical structures. Herewith, experiments were conducted with mammalian cells on complex asymmetrical structures with unequal tungsten and silicon oxide line widths. Results showed that the model could be extended to more complex pattern structures. In addition, cell morphology on the patterned structures reset during cell division because of mitotic rounding, which reduced the population of cells that elongated and aligned on the tungsten lines. Ultimately, we concluded that it was impossible to achieve a 100% alignment with cells having unsynchronized cell cycles because cell rounding during mitosis took precedence over cell alignment; in other words, internal chemical cues had a stronger role in cell morphology than external cues.
Highlights
Nanocomposites have a wide range of applications in electronics [1], mechanical structures [2,3,4], sensors [5], and bioengineering [6,7]
The results showed that if cell height is constrained by external compressive stress or physical confinement during mitosis, the rate of mitosis related defects such as multi-polarity and mortality increases
The chemical-mechanical polished (CMP) tungsten-silicon oxide nanocomposite was prepared with the same fabrication techniques described in our previous work [10] and supplied by Versum
Summary
Nanocomposites have a wide range of applications in electronics [1], mechanical structures [2,3,4], sensors [5], and bioengineering [6,7]. Jahed et al [14] demonstrated that the shape of 3T3 Swiss albino fibroblasts can be influenced by patterns of microscale silicon pillars. In addition to the overall shape of the cell, vertical pillars can alter cell nuclear geometry in prostatic cancer cells (PC3) [11]. Moussa et al [10,15] showed that both mammalian kidney epithelial (Vero) and human dermal fibroblast cells (GM5565) elongate and align on smooth-flat silicon oxide surfaces embedded with parallel tungsten (W) lines. Similar cell alignment morphology was observed in adherent Japanese quail fibrosarcoma cell line cells (QT-35) on these devices as shown in Materials 2020, 13, 335; doi:10.3390/ma13020335 www.mdpi.com/journal/materials
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