The basement membrane of the human corneal epithelium comprises topographic features including fibers, pores, and elevations with feature dimensions on the order of 20-400 nm. Understanding the impact of sub-micron and nanotopography on corneal cell behavior will contribute to our understanding of biomechanical cues and will assist in the design of improved synthetic corneal implants. We utilized well defined ridge and groove wave-like nanostructures (wave ordered structures, WOS) of 60-140 pitches (30-70 nm ridge widths) and 200 nm depths to assess human corneal epithelial cell (HCEC) contact guidance and to establish HCEC contact acuity defined as the lower limit in feature dimensions at which cells respond to biomimetic topographic cues. Results using the WOS substrates demonstrate that HCEC contact acuity is in the range of 60 nm pitch for cells in a serum-free basal medium (EpiLife ® ) and in the range of 90 nm pitch for cells in epithelial medium. To further investigate the influence of HCEC contact acuity in the presence of larger topographic cues, we fabricated 70 nm pitch WOS overlaid parallel to the top of the ridges of 800-4000 nm pitch. HCEC cultured in epithelial medium demonstrate a significant increase in the percent of cells aligning to 4000 nm pitch topography with WOS overlay compared to controls (both flat and 70 nm WOS alone) and 4000 nm pitch topography alone. These results highlight the significance of the lower range of basement membrane scale topographic cues on cell response and allow for improved prosthetic design.
We present a simple and cost-effective method for the fabrication of antireflective surfaces by self-assembly of block copolymers and subsequent plasma etching. The block copolymers create randomly oriented periodic patterns, which are further transferred into fused silica substrates. The reflection on the patterned fused silica surface is reduced to well below 1% in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared ranges by exploiting subwavelength nanostructures with periodicities down to 48 nm. We show that by choosing the appropriate block copolymers and pattern transfer parameters the optical properties of the antireflective surface can be easily tuned, and the spectral measurements verify a significant reduction of the reflectivity by a factor of 10. The experiments, confirmed with simulations based on rigorous diffraction theory, also show that the tapered shape of the nanostructures gives rise to a graded index surface, resulting in a broad-band antireflective behavior.
A major focus in the field of tissue engineering is the regulation of essential cell behaviors through biophysical and biochemical cues from the local extracellular environment. The impact of nanotopographic cues on human corneal epithelial cell (HCEC) contact guidance, proliferation, migration and adhesion have previously been demonstrated. In the current report, we have expanded our study of HCEC response to include both biophysical and controlled biochemical extracellular cues. By exploiting methods for the layer-by-layer coating of substrates with reactive poly(ethylene imine) and poly(2-vinyl-4,4-dimethylazlactone) (PEI/PVDMA)-based multilayer thin films, we have incorporated a single adhesion peptide motif, Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD), onto topographically patterned substrates. This strategy eliminates protein adsorption onto the surface, thus decoupling the effects of the HCEC response to topographic cues from adsorbed proteins and the soluble media proteins. The direction of cell alignment was dependent on the scale of the topographic cues, and, to less of an extent, the culture medium. In EpiLife® medium, cell alignment to unmodified-NOA81 topographic features, which allowed for protein adsorption, differed significantly from cell alignment on RGD-modified features. These results demonstrate that the surface chemical composition affects significantly how HCECs respond to topographic cues. In summary, we demonstrate the modulation of the HCEC response to environmental cues through critical substrate and soluble parameters.
Our study demonstrates that substrates fabricated using a ‘reactive’ layer-by-layer approach promote well-defined cell-substrate interactions of human corneal epithelial cells. Specifically, crosslinked and amine-reactive polymer multilayers were produced by alternating ‘reactive’ deposition of an azlactone-functionalized polymer [poly(2-vinyl-4,4-dimethylazlactone)] and a primary amine-containing polymer [branched poly(ethylene imine)]. Advantages of our system include a 5 to 30-fold decrease in deposition time compared to traditional polyelectrolyte films and direct modification of the films with peptides. Our films react with mixtures of an adhesion-promoting peptide containing Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) and the small molecule d-glucamine, a chemical motif which is non-fouling. Resulting surfaces prevent protein adsorption and promote cell attachment through specific peptide interactions. The specificity of cell attachment via immobilized RGD sequences was verified using both a scrambled RDG peptide control as well as soluble-RGD competitive assays. Films were functionalized with monotonically increasing surface densities of RGD which resulted in both increased cell attachment and the promotion of a tri-phasic proliferative response of a human corneal epithelial cell line (hTCEpi). The ability to treat PEI/PVDMA films with peptides for controlled cell-substrate interactions enables the use of these films in a wide range of biological applications.
A methodology is developed that determines age-specific transition rates between cell cycle phases during balanced growth by utilizing age-structured population balance equations. Age-distributed models are the simplest way to account for varied behavior of individual cells. However, this simplicity is offset by difficulties in making observations of age distributions, so age-distributed models are difficult to fit to experimental data. Herein, the proposed methodology is implemented to identify an age-structured model for human leukemia cells (Jurkat) based only on measurements of the total number density after the addition of bromodeoxyuridine partitions the total cell population into two subpopulations. Each of the subpopulations will temporarily undergo a period of unbalanced growth, which provides sufficient information to extract age-dependent transition rates, while the total cell population remains in balanced growth. The stipulation of initial balanced growth permits the derivation of age densities based on only age-dependent transition rates. In fitting the experimental data, a flexible transition rate representation, utilizing a series of cubic spline nodes, finds a bimodal G(0)/G(1) transition age probability distribution best fits the experimental data. This resolution may be unnecessary as convex combinations of more restricted transition rates derived from normalized Gaussian, lognormal, or skewed lognormal transition-age probability distributions corroborate the spline predictions, but require fewer parameters. The fit of data with a single log normal distribution is somewhat inferior suggesting the bimodal result as more likely. Regardless of the choice of basis functions, this methodology can identify age distributions, age-specific transition rates, and transition-age distributions during balanced growth conditions.
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