Engineering Elastic Nano- and Micro-Patterns and Textures for Directed Cell Motility

Abstract

Summary: We present a reproducible protocol for fabrication of polyacrylamide (PAA) hydrogel-based nano-patterns and nano-textures with a wide range of elastic rigidities to study fundamental cell behaviors, such as mechanosensitivity and motility. We explore the benefits of this protocol by successfully testing the compatibility of the PAA platforms with super-resolution microscopy, which is largely unavailable with platforms of nano-scale textures made from different polymers. We also utilized soft and rigid nano-textures to study the mechanosensing basis of T cell behavior and phenotype.For complete information on the generation and use of this protocol, please refer to Tabdanov et al. (2018b).