Wetting of liquid droplets on living cells

We report here the formation of adhesive conjugates between living cells and properly tailored colloidal liquid droplets bearing a cationic surfactant. We show that the droplets could wet cell surface with a well-defined contact angle, allowing direct determination of the energy of adhesion. We also describe the effect of cationic surfactant concentration on adhesion efficiency. This provides new tools to probe living cell surface properties and find practical laws for cell adhesion on well-defined surfaces.