초록 |
Since the discovery that biological cells can exhibit liquid crystalline order, people in liquid crystals (LCs) field have devoted to find a correlation between the cells and LCs. Here, we report a semifluorinated LC material, called Y002, forming nanogrooves as a result of sublimation and recondensation at air-LC boundary. The nanogrooves can act as a template for growing and aligning NIH-3T3 fibroblast cells after a surface modification with Osmium tetraoxide. The surface property of the nanogrooves can be tuned from hydrophobic to hydrophilic, which enables preferential adhesion of the cells. Moreover, the cell organization can be random or uniaxial depending on the alignment of the nanogrooves. Even other cells, including A375 and HeLa cells, could be cultured and aligned on the nanogrooves, proving its universality. The nanogrooves, therefore, show its potential for understanding tissue engineering, cancer tissue migration, and disease therapies. |