NanoTopoChip: High-throughput nanotopographical cell instruction

Area of Science:

• Biomaterials Science
• Cell Biology
• Nanotechnology

Background:

• Surface topography significantly influences cell phenotype and tissue development.
• Understanding nanotopography's effect on cells is crucial for biomaterial design but limited by fabrication challenges.
• Existing methods lack high-resolution nanotopographies on relevant materials for systematic studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and utilize the Nano-TopoChip for studying the cell-instructive effects of nanoscale topographies.
• To create a high-throughput screening system for analyzing nanotopography-cell morphology relationships.
• To identify nanotopographies with beneficial properties for cell culture and tissue engineering.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of over 1200 defined nanotopographies using deep UV projection and conventional lithography.
• Culture and imaging of actin-RFP labeled U2OS osteosarcoma cells on the Nano-TopoChip.
• Automated image analysis and predictive modeling to correlate nanotopography features with cell morphology.

Main Results:

• Nanotopographies significantly affect cell spreading, orientation, and actin morphology.
• Cell morphological changes can be predicted by feature shape parameters like lateral size and spacing.
• Successful fabrication of high-quality nanoscale features over large surface areas on polystyrene.

Conclusions:

• The Nano-TopoChip platform overcomes fabrication challenges for large-area nanoscale surface engineering.
• This screening system effectively infers nanotopography-cell morphology relationships.
• The platform offers opportunities to discover and study nanotopographies for improved cell culture and tissue engineering applications.