The regulation of stem cell differentiation by cell-cell contact on micropatterned material surfaces

Using the material technique recently developed by us, we prepared a micropattern on poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) hydrogel to keep background resistant to cell adhesion for a long time, which made examination of differentiation of localized stem cells available. Our micropattern designed in this paper prevented or ensured contact between cells adhering in arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) microdomains, and thus afforded a unique way to study the effects of cell-cell contact on the lineage differentiation of stem cells while ruling out the interference of soluble factors or cell seeding concentration etc. As demonstration, mesenchymal stem cells derived from rats were examined in this study, and both osteogenic and adipogenic differentiations were found to be regulated by cell-cell contact. Isolated cells exhibited less significant differentiation than paired or aggregated cells. For those stem cells in contact, the extent of differentiation was fairly linearly related to the extent of contact characterized by coordination number. Additionally, we revealed the existence of some unknown cues besides gap junction responsible for such effects of cell-cell contact.