Establishing fundamentals for regulating cell behavior with engineered physical environments, such as topography and stiffness, requires a large number of cell culture experiments. However, cell culture experiments in cell-surface interaction studies are generally labor-intensive and time-consuming due to many experimental tasks, such as multiple fabrication processes in sample preparation and repetitive medium exchange in cell culture. In this work, a novel aquatic flower-inspired cell culture platform (AFIP) is presented. AFIP aims to facilitate the experiments on the cell-surface interaction studies, especially the medium exchange process. AFIP was devised to capture and dispense cell culture medium based on interactions between an elastic polymer substrate and a liquid medium. Thus, the medium exchange can be performed easily and without the need of other instruments, such as a vacuum suction and pipette. An appropriate design window of AFIP, based on scaling analysis, was identified to provide a criterion for achieving stability in medium exchange as well as various surface characteristics of the petal substrates. The developed AFIP, with physically engineered petal substrates, was also verified to exchange medium reliably and repeatedly. A closed structure capturing the medium was sustained stably during cell culture experiments. NIH3T3 proliferation results also demonstrated that AFIP can be applied to the cell-surface interaction studies as an alternative to the conventional method.
Keywords: Aquatic flower; Cell culture platform; Cell microenvironment; Medium exchange; Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS).