Analysis of Interactions Between Cell and Material Surface Using Evanescent Field

Abstract

Cell adhesion to synthetic materials is crucially important in the various aspects of their biomedical and biotechnological applications. To understand cell behavior on materials, we employed self-assembled monolayers (SAM) of alkanethiols presenting a variety of functional groups as model surfaces, a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) method to determine protein adsorption, and total internal reflection fluorescence microscope (TIRFM) to see cell adhesion process. When SAM was brought into contact with a biological fluid containing cells, proteins immediately adsorbed on the SAM surfaces, and then cell adhesion occurred. Cell adhesion on the materials was determined by the quantity, composition, and conformation of adsorbed proteins. We believe that the three methods, SAM, SPR and TIRFM are very useful methods for future more detail studies on cell-material interactions.