Effects of Biomimetic Micropatterned Surfaces on the Adhesion and Morphology of Cervical Cancer Cells

[Image: see text] It has been demonstrated that micropatterned surfaces have an important influence on modulating cellular behavior. In recent years, with the rapid development of microfabrication techniques and in-depth study of nature, an increasing number of patterned structures imitating natural organisms have been successfully fabricated and widely evaluated. However, there are only a few reports about biomimetic patterned microstructures in biologically related fields. In our work, micropatterned polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) was fabricated by mimicking the surface microstructures of natural Trifolium and Parthenocissus tricuspidata leaves using the template duplication method. The interactions between the two types of biomimetic micro-PDMS surfaces and two kinds of human cervical cancer cells (HeLa and SiHa) were investigated. HeLa and SiHa cells cultured on the two micropatterned PDMS samples exhibited more stretchable morphology, higher diffusion, and a much lower nuclear/cytoplasmic ratio than those cultured on flat PDMS surfaces, indicating a higher adhesion area of the cells. Both of the micro-PDMS substrates were found to induce significantly different morphological changes between HeLa and SiHa cells. This suggests that the micropatterned structure affects cell adhesion and morphology correlated with their surface geometric structure and roughness. The results reveal that biomimetic micropatterned surfaces from natural leaves significantly regulate the morphology and adhesion behavior of cervical cancer cells and are believed to be the new platforms for investigating the interaction between cells and substrates.