Cell adhesion is crucial to cell behaviors including survival, growth and differentiation. In recent years, quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation detection (QCM-D) was used to study cell-surface interactions during cell adhesion process owing to its advantage on obtaining real-time viscoelastic changes. Combined with optical microscope (OM) observation, cell morphology and corresponding viscoelastic changes can be obtained concurrently. Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) are known for their convenience and versatile to modify the surface. A series of zeta potential can be obtained by introducing mixed functional groups of amine and carboxylic acid to the substrate. On this serial surface, the adhesion rate of NIH3T3 was found to be significantly affected by the zeta potential. In this work, the effect of zeta potential to the adhesion process of NIH3T3 and its surface-cell interaction were monitored with a combined system of OM and QCM-D. NIH3T3 cells were seeded and cultured on the SAM-modified gold-coating quartz crystal in the QCM-D window chamber for in situ OM observation at 37°C. Time-lapsed images were obtained by OM for observing the changes in cell morphology and mobility. In addition, after 4h in situ examination of cell attachment, cells were fixed and then dehydrated for scanning electric microscope (SEM) investigation in low vacuum mode to examine their finer feature. The QCM-D results show that with increasing negative charge on the surfaces, the cell attachment process induces less frequency and dissipation shifts indicating less cell-substrate interaction. Moreover, the in situ OM observation shows that mobility was increasing as the surface potential reduced. On the other hand, more-stretched cell morphologies were observed with stronger positive surface potential indicating stronger cell-substrate interaction.

Dynamic observation of NIH3T3 cells adhesion behaviors on binary self-assembled monolayers modified gold surfaces

249th National Meeting (2015)

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