Understand the material cues to regulate cell behaviors is critical for developing biomaterials. As a cue of material chemistry, functional groups might play an important role in regulating cells including stem cells.

By combining the self-assembly monolayer and micropatterning techniques, Ding’s group investigates the influence of functional groups on stem cell adhesion and differentiation under well controlled spreading areas. They found for the first time that under the same cell spreading area, functional groups had no influence on chondrogenic differentiation of stem cells. They illustrate that on free surfaces, functional groups regulate stem cell differentiation via tuning protein adsorption, then nonspecific cell adhesion and thus cell spreading.

The above figure shows fluorescence micrographs of cells with F-actins, vinculins and nuclei stained after the MSCs underwent chondrogenic induction for 9 days on surfaces with indicated different functional groups, and statistics of spreading area and cell density on surfaces.

The paper has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, with Mr. Bin Cao, a PhD student supervised by Professor Jiandong DING as the first author. See details：Bin Cao, Yuanmeng Peng, Xiangnan Liu, Jiandong Ding*, Effects of Functional Groups of Materials on Nonspecific Adhesion and Chondrogenic Induction of Mesenchymal Stem Cells on Free and Micropatterned Surfaces, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 9, 23574-85 (2017). 

Links: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.7b08339