Are micropatterned substrates for directed cell organization an effective method to create ordered 3D tissue constructs?
Tissue-engineered constructs grown in vitro tend to have random arrangements of cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) and much research effort is aimed at developing long-range organization in tissue-engineered constructs. Contact guidance, which utilizes substrates with topographical patterns of the scale of single cells (0.1-100 microm) to limit cell adhesion to specific locations and to influence cell shape and orientation, is one popular method which has been used to generate order in cell cultures. The use of contact guidance to generate three-dimensional (3D) order relies on the assumption that a newly forming cell or tissue layer will be guided by the organization of the previous layer, which has been organized by the patterned substrate. However, the ability for cellular patterns to be coupled through organized cell layers from a patterned substrate has not been effectively demonstrated. The results of this study demonstrate that, although the patterned substrate induces initial
