Tailored electroactive and quantitative ligand density microarrays applied to stem cell differentiation

The ability to precisely control the interactions between Materials and mammalian cells at the molecular level is crucial to understanding the fundamental chemical nature of how the local environment influences cellular behavior as well as for developing new biomaterials for a range of biotechnological and tissue engineering applications. In this report, we develop and apply for the first time a quantitative electroactive microarray strategy that can present a variety of ligands with precise control over ligand density to study human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSC) differentiation on transparent surfaces with a new method to quantitate adipogenic differentiation. We found that both the ligand composition and ligand density influence the rate of adipogenic differentiation from hMSC's. Furthermore, this new analytical biotechnology method is compatible with other biointerfacial characterization technologies (surface plasmon resonance, mass spectrometry) and can also be applied to investigate a range of protein-ligand or cell-material interactions for a variety of systems biology studies or cell behavior based assays.