Cell-Type Dependent Effect of Surface-Patterned Microdot Arrays on Neuronal Growth

Abstract

Surface micropatterns have been widely used as chemical cues to control the microenvironment of cultured neurons, particularly for neurobiological assays and neurochip designs. However, the cell-type dependency on the interactions between neurons and underlying micropatterns has been rarely investigated despite the inherent differences in the morphology of neuronal types. In this study, we used surface-printed microdot arrays to investigate the effect of the same micropatterns on the growth of mouse spinal interneuron, mouse hippocampal neurons, and rat hippocampal neurons. While mouse hippocampal neurons showed no significantly different growth on control and patterned substrates, we found the microdot arrays had different effects on early neuronal growth depending on the cell type; spinal interneurons tended to grow faster in length, whereas hippocampal neurons tended to form more axon collateral branches in response to the microdot arrays. Although there was a similar trend in the neurite length and branch number of both neurons changed across the microdot arrays with the expanded range of size and spacing, the dominant responses of each neuron, neurite elongation of mouse spinal interneurons and branching augmentation of rat hippocampal neurons were still preserved. Therefore, our results demonstrate that the same design of micropatterns could cause different neuronal growth results, raising an intriguing issue of considering cell types in neural interface designs.

Characterization of dorsal root ganglion neurons cultured on silicon micro-pillar substrates

“…In our case, neurite alignment along 30°, 90° and 150° radial angles was only obvious in the first two bins. Although others found that neurite growth pattern depends on the cell type37383940 in our study, a similar type of neurite growth was present in all three main subtypes of the DRG neurons, both neonatal and adult.…”

Autaptic Cultures: Methods and Applications

“…An alternative method for studying single neurons in isolation is to use very-low-density cultures, which have been described in detail elsewhere (e.g., Goslin et al, 1998;Ventimiglia and Lindsay, 1998;Fath et al, 2009); I will not be discussing this approach here. I will also not be discussing the use of similar cultures to study neurite growth on patterned substrates, which is of interest to the design of brain-machine interfaces (e.g., Jang et al, 2016;Gautam et al, 2017).…”

Instrumented Microphysiological Systems for Real-Time Measurement and Manipulation of Cellular Electrochemical Processes

“…The adaption of lithographic techniques to manipulate surface chemistry has paved the way for patterning 2D neural structures in vitro (Kleinfeld et al., 1988). Patterning of surface coatings with microcontact-printing has been utilized to create simple neural circuits (Jang et al., 2016, Jungblut et al., 2009, Marconi et al., 2012). However, both adhesive and repellant surface coatings, especially finer features (<10 μm), are unstable in culture, often degrading within one week (Wheeler and Brewer, 2010).…”