Analytical Sciences

Recent Advances in Cell Micropatterning Techniques for Bioanalytical and Biomedical Sciences

Jun NAKANISHI,*^1,*² Tohru TAKARADA,*³ Kazuo YAMAGUCHI,*⁴ and Mizuo MAEDA*³

*1 International Center for Young Scientists, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan
*2 PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), 4-1-8 Honcho, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan
*3 Bioengineering Laboratory, Discovery Research Institute, RIKEN, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
*4 Department of Materials Science, Faculty of Science, Kanagawa University, 2946 Tsuchiya, Hiratsuka, Kanagawa 259-1293, Japan

Cell micropatterning is an important technique for a wide range of applications, such as tissue engineering, cell-based drug screening, and fundamental cell biology studies. This paper overviews cell patterning techniques based on chemically modified substrates with different degrees of cell adhesiveness. In particular, the focus is on dynamic substrates that change their cell adhesiveness in response to external stimuli, such as heat, voltage, and light. Such substrates allow researchers to achieve an in situ alteration of patterns of cell adhesiveness, which is useful for co-culturing multiple cell types and analyzing dynamic cellular activities. As an example of dynamic substrates, we introduce a dynamic substrate based on a caged compound, where we accomplished a light-driven alteration of cell adhesiveness and the analysis of a single cell's motility.

J-STAGE: View this article in J-STAGE