Adhesive-tape soft lithography for patterning mammalian cells: application to wound-healing assays

This paper introduces a benchtop method for patterning mammalian cells-i.e., for culturing cells at specific locations on planar substrates. Compared with standard cell culture techniques, which do not allow the control of what areas of a monolayer are populated by one type of cell or another, techniques of cell patterning open new routes to cell biology. Researchers interested in cell patterning, however, are oftentimes hindered by limited access to photolithographic capabilities. This paper shows how cells can be patterned easily with sub-millimeter precision using a non-photolithographic technique that is based on the use of office adhesive tape and poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS). This method is fast (similar to 4 h to go from a layout to have the cells patterned in the shape of such layout) and only requires materials and tools readily available in a conventional biomedical laboratory. A wound-healing assay is presented here that illustrates the potential of the technique (which we call tape-based soft lithography) for patterning mammalian cells and studying biologically significant questions such as collective cellular migration.