Molecular Nanoscale Cell Manipulation

Culturing cells in vitro is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. Nevertheless, even for intensively studied cells, many of the factors that induce or stabilize differentiated phenotypes are poorly understood and difficult to mimic in vitro. Cell surfaces possess a spatially organized array of receptors that serve as a fingerprint to every type of cell. These receptor fingerprints regulate information transfer into the cell thereby initiating a plethora of intracellular processes. Also when cells interact with other cells or other materials, these fingerprints regulate a number of cellular processes. Insights into the molecular basis of such processes have tremendously increased the last decades and can now be directed towards the functional construction of patterned surfaces that mimic the receptor fingerprints. When such structured surfaces display a biological interface with nanometer resolution, a length scale inherently more relevant to biorecognition than micro- or macro-length scales, the communication through biomolecules with cellular receptors can be modulated and studied with unprecedented specificity. In this proposal, an innovative construction process of biological nanoarrays will be developed to study important fundamental aspects of cell biology. We propose integrated strategies combining chemical assembly with nanofabrication techniques to engineer stable and functional biological architectures on a variety of surfaces. Developing the ability to control the shape, size and chemical composition of structures on the 1-100 nm length scale is an exciting challenge because it opens new applications in a number of fields ranging from bioelectronics to medical diagnostics.