Observation of Cellular Behaviour
The sizes of the surface features that a cell might encounter in its natural environment span the nanometer-to-micrometer range of topographies.
These environments include extracellular matrix, other cells, organisms, tissues, artificial materials, and various forms of the surface coatings or roughness that have been used for dental and orthopedic implants.
changes in the fibroblasts' morphology, orientation, and focal contact after culturing on micro-pillars of various dimensional configurations.
Influence of Pillar Structure on Cellular Morphology and Migration
When we seeded the fibroblasts onto the cultured substrate, all of the cells settled on the tops of the pillars through the effect of gravity. Initially, each cell generally exhibited a circular shape that had a diameter of ca. 10 Β΅m. The fibroblasts adhered well to all of the substrates used with no significant observable differences. In contrast, the degree of cell proliferation was clearly different for the different pillar substrates and the number of proliferated cells changed gradually in inverse proportion to the heights of the pillars. The responses of the fibroblast cells to the various pillar substrates are very interesting; they are clearly diverse in morphology relative to those prepared generally in flat culture dishes, especially the Si-1-3-10 pillar substrate (Substrate notation: Si is silicon material; first number is pillar diameter; second number is pillar separation; third number is pillar height.), whose strange metamorphosis particularly attracted our interest. Our following experiments focused on the special behaviour of the fibroblast cells on the Si-1-3-10 pillar substrate. Fig. 3 displays a fibroblast that had highly elongated processes that extended from the central nucleus simultaneously in the x and y directions