Enhanced mobility of neural cells with a transparent electric field stimulator

Mobility is one of the important characteristics of living cells. It also plays a significant role in therapeutic cell transplantation with target location specificity. To enhance cell mobility, a neural cell stimulator was assembled with graphenes, which are two-dimensional nanocarbon materials that form a transparent electrode over the cover glass in a cell culture dish. This transparent stimulator applies electrical field stimulation to the neural cells. The advantages of this new transparent electrical field stimulator (TEFS) with a graphene electrode include transparency, because few layered graphenes are optically transparent, and biocompatibility, because the cover glass is coated with laminin. In this paper, it is reported that constant electric field stimulation, which is at a specific strength, facilitates the mobility of a neural cell and makes the visibility of cellular behavior on the electrode much better than that of any other existing cell stimulator that has metal electrodes. The strength of the electrical field for stimulating cells varies from 4.5 mV/mm to 450 mV/mm. When continuous electric field stimulation was applied for 4 hours at the electric field strength of 45 mV/mm, the mobility of the neural cells was significantly enhanced compared to the control conditions, wherein there was no electric field stimulation. Thus, the feasibility of the TEFS with the nanothickness of graphene was tested to modulate the mobility of neural cells in vitro. The result suggests that electrical field stimulation could enhance neural cell alignment, cell-to-cell coupling, and networks, and may be applied to cell transplantation to boost therapeutic effectiveness.