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Updated: Jun 14, 2026

Control of Cell Adhesion using Hydrogel Patterning Techniques for Applications in Traction Force Microscopy
Published on: January 29, 2022
Enhanced adhesion by gecko-inspired hierarchical fibrillar adhesives
Michael P Murphy1, Seok Kim, Metin Sitti
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-3890, USA. mikemurphy@cmu.edu
Abstract:
The complex structures that allow geckos to repeatably adhere to surfaces consist of multilevel branching fibers with specialized tips. We present a novel technique for fabricating similar multilevel structures from polymer materials and demonstrate the fabrication of arrays of two- and three-level structures, wherein each level terminates in flat mushroom-type tips. Adhesion experiments are conducted on two-level fiber arrays on a 12-mm-diameter glass hemisphere, which exhibit both increased adhesion and interface toughness over one-level fiber samples and unstructured control samples. These adhesion enhancements are the result of increased surface conformation as well as increased extension during detachment.
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